Jane Austen and History Revisited:

The Past, Gender, and Memory from the Restoration to Persuasion

Woolf, Daniel

Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 26 (2004) 217-237

The knowledge of history is thought a necessary accomplishment in one sex, and an essential part
ofeducation in the other. We ought, however, to distinguish between that knowledge of history and
ofchronology which is really useful, and that which is acquired merely for parade. We must call that
usefulknowledge which enlarges the view of human life, and of human nature … (Edgeworth, Practical
Education, 1815, I, 442)

CURIOUS READERS MAY BE PARDONED if they respond to the title of this essay with a question:
"Did Jane Austen have much at all to say about history?" The answer is that she had a good deal to say about
that subject, both in the narrow sense of a literary form or genre, and in the more commonplace sense of "the
events of the past." While Austen, unlike an earlier novelist such as Fielding, does not call her novels
"histories," they are such in the literary sense that Fielding intended. All the complete Austennovels have a
beginning, a middle and an end, fitting them squarely within one of the traditional meanings of history as
being equivalent to "story," true or false. (2) True, Austen is notable for making very few references to
external events, and particularly to past events--thus putting her in striking contrast to her great
contemporary Sir Walter Scott. But as Karl Kroeber has observed, if one considers the daily interactions of
men and women living through the historical process that situates them in a particular timeand milieu, lives
examined under an "electron microscope," then Austen is surely a historical novelist, albeit one devoted to
current "social developments and deteriorations," rather than to the past per se(Kroeber 10). Christopher
Kent has reinforced this point, noting the varieties of history we can learn both "with, and from" Jane Austen
(Kent 1981 and 1989).
Austen's attitude to "real solemn history"--that is, the genre--has always been more problematic. I do
not think it a sustainable view that Austen disliked history, though at least one of her major characters might
be said to do so. Nor was she either blind or indifferent to it, even though the words "history" and"historian"
appear no more than sixty-six times in her corpus (Looser 180), and often in usages that might now appear
archaic, such as the "history" of a day's events. Austen's opinion of history in its various shapes is not a new
topic, though it has perhaps still not had the full attention it merits. It flits in and out ofcritical accounts of
aspects of Jane Austen's writing, notably D. D. Devlin's Jane Austen and Education,and Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar have highlighted a key passage of Northanger Abbey to find evidence that, if Austen did not
quite hate history, she at least refused to take it very seriously (Gilbert and Gubar132-34)--a more terrible
offence against that most grave and pompous of Enlightenment literary forms.Most attention has been paid
to the topic by Kent, in a pair of insightful essays that open up but do notexhaust the subject (Kent 1981;
Kent 1989). (3) What has largely been lacking, notable exceptions such asDevoney Looser's important recent
study (178-203) aside, is any attempt to situate Austen in a muchlonger history of women's relations with
what has become the modern discipline of history (Davis 1980; Smith 1984 and 1998). This in itself is a
story that goes back to the Restoration, and beyond that to theRenaissance, at which time, it can be argued,
humanist pedagogy succeeded in gendering historicaldiscourse as male (Woolf 1997, 647-48).
This essay has three aims. First, I would like briefly to provide this missing backdrop of intellectual
andcultural history since the Restoration, concentrating especially on prescriptions by men and women
forfemale history reading (covered more extensively in Looser; Woolf 1997; Phillips 11018), and the parallel
development of a rival, nonpolitical sense of the past that found literary expression in biography and
autobiography, travel writings and correspondence. Secondly, I want to explore a wider presence of thepast
in Austen's novels with particular attention to the treatment of memory and recollection. This awareness--we
might call it a "sensibility"--is not specifically historical. It does not refer to external majorevents of the
remote or recent past. It does, however, provide a sympathetic yet firm bedrock upon whichto build, for
Austen, an acceptable role for more structured accounts of the past and for the positive valuation of the
forensic activity entailed by historical thought--a logical and inductive procedure to which many
commentators thought women ill-suited. Thus, a true historical sense can be said to arise from a more
emotional sensibility. Thirdly and finally, I shall attempt to establish a progression of sorts inAusten's major
novels from the outright hostility to history as a genre that appears to spring out of the unfinished History of
England and (more ambiguously) in Northanger Abbey, toward a reconciliation with history in Mansfield
Park (the critical work in terms of Austen's engagement with the history of historical pedagogy), and a
working out of the implications of this in Emma and especially Persuasion.
The attitude of male authors of the Restoration and early eighteenth century to history's utility marks
thestudy of the past out as something suitable for their wives and daughters, but not to be undertaken toward
the same ends. John Locke's discussions of history and chronology are thoroughly gender-specific,
eventhough his general educational precepts are not, in contrast to Rousseau's Emile a century later. Locke
suggests that history is best left "to the study of Grown Men," or at least to "young lad[s]" (Locke 1989,238).
(4) His contemporary John Aubrey similarly prescribed historical texts specifically with only gentlemen in
mind. This was a surprising point of view since he had received his earliest lessons in history"from the
Conquest down to Charles I in ballad," from his nurse, and since, too, he recalled that "In the old, ignorant
times, before women were readers ... history was banded downe from mother to daughter"(Aubrey 1972, 71,
75; Aubrey 1975, v. I, 93, 99, 102, 106, 11516; Aubrey 1881, 67-68). Throughout theeighteenth century,
which took Locke to heart on many issues, the longer-standing humanist trope that thehistorian must be a
"man of affairs," a soldier or statesman, was repeated afresh. This by and largeexcluded women from
attempting to write formal history themselves--though there were a number ofimportant instances of this
restriction being transgressed, such as Catharine Macaulay and the Americanrevolutionary Mercy Otis
Warren, and historical events and figures loomed large in the fictional ordramatic work of many others
(Smith 1984; Baym 29-40). (5)
Reading, however, was a different matter, and here Locke's advice was not heeded by most female
andmale writers on education and manners. These authors were beginning by the late seventeenth century
totake the side of history--before this time a relatively minor early modern genre if numbers of titles prior
to1640 are to be believed (Woolf 2000)--over both poetry and prose fiction. Throughout the eighteenth
century, continued efforts were made to impress upon women the superiority of history to the French
romance and its native successor, the novel. At the same time writers of fiction continued to adopt the
titleand narrative realism of history without abandoning sentiment (Hunter 327-29, 339-45). (6) David Hume
recommended history because it would appeal to women and at the same time be more instructive than
novels or romances. On the other hand, he also astutely recognized that the political aspects of the past
would bore most female readers, and made a strong case for the passions, including love, as ingredients
essential to history (Hume 1741, 508-13; Lloyd 50-56; Phillips, esp 103-128). "If Mrs. Mure be not sorryfor
poor King Charles," Hume told his friend William Mute in 1754, "I shall burn all my papers, & returnto
philosophy" (Phillips 61; Hume Letters, 1:210 [Hume to Mure, Oct. 1754]; Hume New Letters 48[Hume to
Robertson, April 1759]).
If the novel had by now taken on the mimetic quality of a history in the works of Fielding and Sarah
Scott,history itself could safely move in the direction of the novel in order to make its own truths more
stirring.This view was shared by conservative English women writers of the second half of the eighteenth
century.Hester Chapone, for instance, advised young women not to bother with "learned languages." To read
works in English or in another modern tongue was suitable to a lady; to attempt higher learning would puther
in danger of pedantry, of "exchanging the graces of imagination for the severity and preciseness of a
scholar." Even more persuasive, however, is Chapone's sharp distinction between a woman's purpose in
reading history and a man's. Though English historians are susceptible to partisan influences, this need not
concern the female reader. "As you will not read with a critical view, nor enter deeply into politics, I think
you may be allowed to choose that which is most entertaining" (Chapone 158, 2002). Chapone's position
might be best represented, among Jane Austen's characters, in Catharine's Mrs. Stanley. This lady "never
hazarded a remark on History that was not well founded"--Austen is being ironic--and she simplistically sees
the reign of Elizabeth I (whom she values principally for having lived long and being clever) as apeak of
civilized "manners" from which the world has since declined (Minor Works, 201).
 It was as much against the Chapones of the world as against male writers like Hume that
MaryWollstonecraft had to contend in her recommendations for a genderless education in which girls and
boys, studying together, could learn "religion, history, the history of man, and politics" (Wollstonecraft, 356).
Here, as in other contexts, Wollstonecraft's opinions were unusually subversive. For earlier writers, male and
female, history was a useful and safe genre with which respectable ladies could amuse themselves, butto no
great end. In Wollstonecraft's view, women and men ought to read history in the same way, as aserious genre
conducive to preparing youth of both genders for civic life (Wollstonecraft 392; Phillips 114-15). Her
judgment on the matter is far from Hume's and further still from Chapone's, but it is almost entirely
orthogonal to the more deeply antihistorical position represented by the first of Austen's major heroines,
Catherine Morland.
Kroeber's above-cited version of the "historical" in Austen generally and Sense and Sensibility
specifically consists of the flowing of the social present into a vague and only implied past. Is this in the end
all thehistory we are likely to get? I would suggest not. Signs of the past can be found everywhere in
Austen's novels, often burdensome traces that emotionally affect one or other of the characters (I say
emotionally todistinguish legal residue of the past such as the entailment of the Bennet estate that affect
characters' physical and social circumstances --the "dead hand" theme that figures prominently in later
novelists suchas Dickens and George Eliot). The persistence of memory, in particular, is a recurrent theme.
Austen explores both the painful and pleasurable aspects of memory quite explicitly, and she contrasts the
pedagogical use of memory as an archive for the storage of information with its moral and aesthetic usesin
the sense of personal recollection of and judgment of the past, borrowing a distinction from Maria
andRichard Lovell Edgeworth's Practical Education (ii, 216-73). Both retentive and recollective memory
feature in Northanger Abbey. When we first meet Catherine Morland, we are told that she has abandoned her
tomboyish indifference to books (despite her mother's attention to her learning), and is now "in training for a
heroine," acquiring quotations for her memory. Provided that no "useful information" could begleaned, and
provided that "they were all story and no reflection," Catherine could find any book acceptable (15). The
selection of material she reads is a pastiche of the prescriptions of eighteenth-centurycourtesy literature and
of periodicals such as the Ladies Magazine: some Pope here, a smattering of Shakespeare there, but above all
her beloved gothic novels, and in particular Mrs. Radcliffe's Udolpho (Copeland 154-71). What she does
with this memorized buffet is create an immature universe of romance in which melancholic generals murder
their wives in decaying abbeys--a story notably wanting inreflection on either motive or probability. In
manufacturing this world Catherine anticipates the less melodramatic but more harmful activities of a later
Austen dilettante and extract-maker, EmmaWoodhouse. But in Northanger Abbey we also have the other, and
much more important meaning of an aesthetic and ethical memory, a memory that intuitively recovers the
past, complete with an idea of itsgood or evil, from clues not found in books but in landscape, architecture,
furniture, and an inclination to the picturesque.
We get this first in Eleanor Tilney's comment that a particular grove of Scotch firs always reminds her
ofher departed mother--the earliest reference to the late Mrs. Tilney, a memory that must be simultaneously
joyful yet sad, its pleasure self-inscribed with the stomach-sinking pain of loss. Some things are
bestforgotten. The memory that will cause Catherine the most pain is that of her unfounded suspicions of
thegeneral, shattered by her awakening from "visions of romance" in the presence of Henry
Tilney.Recollection of this is made worse by the fact that no apologetic reconciliation with the general is
possible, for if he is not Bluebeard, he is certainly tyrannical and eccentric. Though her secret is safe with
Henry,there are decorative reminders of her near-gaffe lying about, like japanned furniture; even the mention
of achest or cabinet may cause her to tremble. "But even she," writes Austen "could allow that an occasional
memento of past folly, however painful, might not be without use" (190).
This last remark is the first indication of the dual power of memory to please and to torment. It is a the
memore explicitly developed, among the early novels, in Pride and Prejudice. The heroine of this novel,
certainly a favorite with readers, is of all Austen's flawed heroines perhaps the most well adjusted to
theworld, in spite of her dysfunctional parents, a liability Catherine Morland does not share. Elizabeth
combines Catherine's spark of excitement with the practicality of the only unflawed Austen heroine,
Persuasion's Anne Elliot, and the "sense" of Elinor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility). Though prone to error
in her judgments, Elizabeth is able to revaluate events and facts on her own without a male tutor. Hergood
humoured adjustment to her world is signified, for one, by an interest in books and libraries that is infinitely
more critical than either the fiction-fixated Catherine, or Elizabeth's own sister Mary, a caricature pedant.
The past and its remembrance (or suppression) is touched on several times: in "the charm of
recollection" experienced by Mrs. Gardiner, the closest to an adult role model for Elizabeth Bennet; and in
Elizabeth'sown willingness, so far as Wickham and Lydia are concerned, to circle around the recollection of
trauma, urging her new brother-in-law, "'Do not let us quarrel about the past.'" Elizabeth's ability to retain
what she wants of the past and leave the rest is most clearly expressed to Darcy near the end of the novel,
when he frets to her about the continued existence of a key historical document, his angry letter to Elizabeth
explaining his side of his relations with Wickham. She brushes this aside suggesting that the past is, as we
might say, like water off a duck's back. "'You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past asits
remembrance gives you pleasure.'" (7) Or, as she tells her sister Jane, staggered by the revolution in
Elizabeth's feelings for Darcy from prejudice to love, "'You know nothing of the matter. That is all to
beforgot. Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memoryis
unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.'" All this effort at forgetting is a departure
from Catherine Morland all right, but no more so than from Sense and Sensibility's Marianne who, unable to
filter the past, must grin and bear it. As Marianne disingenuously remarks to EdwardFerrars, well before her
abrupt jilting by Willoughby, "'I love to be reminded of the past, Edward. Whetherit be melancholy or gay, I
love to recall it; and you will never offend me by talking of former times'" (92).
The mnemonic theme occurs as frequently in the three later novels. In Mansfield Park, its double
meaning, rote memorization versus inward recollection appears more clearly--a distinction that Austen may
have borrowed directly from Maria Edgeworth. Here, Austen draws for us a contrast between Julia and
MariaBertram, on the one hand, and their church-mouse cousin Fanny Price. The Bertram girls have
beenneglected by their mother and flattered into air headed foolishness by Aunt Norris. But they know that
they've read something, even if they've forgotten when they read it, what it said, or what it means.
"'But,aunt,'" pipes up one of them with regard to Fanny, "'she is really so very ignorant.... I cannot remember
the time when I did not know a great deal that she has not the least notion of yet. How long ago it is, aunt,
since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and
most of the principal events of their reigns!'" Mrs. Norris replies by endorsing that sort of memory-through-
repetition that the Edgeworths had specifically condemned as conducive to indolence, and hostileto the
development of both reason and invention. (8) "Very true, indeed, my dears, but you are blessedwith
wonderful memories, and your poor cousin has probably none at all. There is a vast deal of differencein
memories, as well as in everything else, and therefore you must make allowance for your cousin, and pity her
deficiency" (18-19).
Fanny, in contrast to her cousins, knows little of book learning at this stage, though she is about to be
instructed by her governess and by Edmund. What she does have, however, is the same female sense of the
connection of time and place that we saw earlier in Eleanor Tilney (Northanger Abbey), and in Mrs.Gardiner
(Pride and Prejudice). This sense is both external and internal. Externally, it is represented in a romantic
(even Morlandesque) attitude toward places such as the chapel at Sotherton, which Fanny finds lacking in
awe and melancholy--devoid of the sense that "'a Scottish monarch sleeps below'" (85-86). (9) Internally,
however, we see it in her recourse to mnemonically-loaded personal objects (152), in reminiscences of
childhood, and in responses to scenes of natural change that tie the external world to the interior mind.
"'Every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. Three years ago, this
was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of asanything, or capable
of becoming anything ... and perhaps in another three years we may be forgetting--almost forgetting what it
was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and thechanges of the human
mind'" (208, italics added). Once again, one can't quite expunge recollection--only"almost." Fanny
immediately follows this up with an addition: "'if any one faculty of our nature may becalled more wonderful
than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the
powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences'" (208-9). Fanny is
beginning to be educated in formal history (we will come back to this), but that is not her topic here, rather
the powers of subjective perception and recollection. And in case wemiss the difference between the two,
Austen intrudes, quite deliberately with a rare historical referent thatseems jarringly out of place: Mary
Crawford, seeing her own presence in the shrubbery as the mostmarvelous thing about it, compares herself to
a Venetian doge at the court of Louis XIV. And Fanny is asmuch a victim of the pains of memory as its
pleasures; her visit home thrusts before her eyes the image ofanother Mary, her favorite, and dead, younger
sister.
In Austen's final novel, Persuasion, we learn that Fanny's recognition of the dark and bright sides of
memory, rather than Elizabeth Bennet's selection of it, may be the true late of the female sex. In a key
passage near the end, Anne Elliot argues with Captain Harville as to whether women forget men more easily
than the other way round. (Anne is defending Captain Benwick's engagement to Louisa despite his previous
deep depression at the death of his fiancee, Harville's sister.) This is usually read as a defense of women
against the old trope about female fickleness. But it is also a consideration of the reasons why women must
remember the past, whether they wish to or not, whereas men have the freedom to live in thepresent. Anne
gives Harville the option of ascribing this difference either to inward nature (sex) or to socially defined
gender roles, the private and the public, though her own argument begins and ends with gender, not sex.
"We [i.e., women] certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate, rather
thanour merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.
Youare forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take
you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions." (232)
For men, the urgency of the new present will invariably drive out the old past, complete with most of
itsmental burdens.
It should be clear from this discussion that the mental and physical refuse of the past is scattered
liberally about the novels. But what of the literary genre, Catherine Morland's "'real solemn history'"? Few
would doubt the proposition that the younger Austen is, if not hostile to history, then at least lukewarm and
picky. Rather like one of her very early characters, Kitty, addressing her new friend Miss Stanley; it might be
saidof Austen that "though She was well read in Modern history herself, she chose rather to speak first of
Books of a lighter kind, of Books universally read and Admired ..." (Catharine, Minor Works, 198-
99).Austen appears at first sight to cut Clio dead in Northanger Abbey, her first-written novel, through
heryoung protagonist. Miss Morland is no proximate authorial voice like an Anne Elliot or a Mr.
Knightley.But there is little reason to doubt that her position of complete unresponsiveness to serious history
and her preference for the imaginative world of the novel reflects at some level views that Austen had at one
time entertained. Catherine regards history as among the principal instruments of torture--another gothic
image--used on young minds to teach them reading, which is a fair comment on a four hundred year old
traditionof humanist pedagogy that still used Caesar, catechizing, and the cane the way recent generations
haveused Dr. Seuss, workbooks and cookies.
However, we have independent clues to Austen's views on history in the Juvenilia and unfinished
works, evidence suggesting that at this age she was not so much anti-historical as iconoclastic. Kitty, for
instance, chooses historical dispute to test the knowledge and abilities of Edward Stanley, and takes "every
opportunity of turning the Conversation on History" (Catharine, Minor Works, 230-31). At about the same
time, we have fuller comments in the incomplete History of England, with its bitingly sarcastic judgments on
particular historical characters and few dates at all, save for a triptych of Tudor beheadings (MinorWorks,
138-49; Burton 42). Written in 1791, with the French Revolution heating up just across the channel, it is not
surprising that sad stories of the deaths of kings occupied the teenaged Austen, though she managed to turn
them into rather funny ones, anticipatory of a much later parody, 1066 and All That.Genuine rebellion
against received opinion can be found in Austen's contempt for Elizabeth I, also evidentin Kitty's riposte to
Mrs. Stanley in Catharine (Minor Works 201). And there is a healthy if rather contrary skepticism to tradition
in the author's belief that Richard III was in fact "a very respectable man" (History141), a position first
advanced in Catharine by Edward Stanley (Minor Works 231), while Henry VII was" as great a Villain as
ever lived" (History 141). One finds also the emotive empathy for particular figures such as Mary Queen of
Scots, and a willingness to set aside a general weariness with history to pursue thedefense of its victims with
zeal. It is easier to connect emotionally with an individual, fictional or historical, than with the grand
movement of events, easier to intuit the hopes, joys and dread within asingle life than to memorize its dates.
Biographies of queens would prove an appealing genre in the nineteenth century, and Austen would find
successors in ensuing decades in such historians as the Strickland sisters, Agnes and Elizabeth.
We have other, later evidence in a letter of the year 1800 to Martha Lloyd concerning Jane's
forthcoming visit. This contains an even harder-edged satire of the sort of historical learning Catherine would
reject and the Bertram sisters would crow about.
I am now laying in a stock of intelligence to pour out on you as my
share of Conversation.--I am reading [Robert] Henry's History
of England, which I will repeat to you in any manner you may prefer
either in a loose, disultary, unconnected strain, or dividing my
recital as the Historian divides it himself, into seven parts, The
Civil & Military-Religion-Constitution-Learning & Learned Men-Arts
& Sciences-Commerce Coins & Shipping-& Manners;--so that
for every evening of the week there will be a different subject.
(10)
 If Martha will repeat the French grammar and Mrs. Stent will "now & then ejaculate some wonder
about the cocks & hens, what can we want?" (Letters, JA to Martha Lloyd, 12 Nov. 1800). This letter is all
the more powerful because the history that is rejected is, notwithstanding the inclusion of military and
constitutional matters, rather different from political history of Hume, Clarendon and all those unnamed
historians whom Catherine will affect to despise; Henry had endeavored, with limited success, to pay
attention to the histoire des moeurs that eighteenth-century women found more appealing. (11) Nor do we
find much change in Austen's attitude to history as a genre over a decade later when, fretting to her sister
about the "lightness" of Pride and Prejudice, she wonders--though not for long--whether she ought not
tohave introduced some un-comic relief, something "if not of solemn specious nonsense--about something
unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Sir Walter Scott, or the history ofBuonaparte
--or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness &
Epigrammatism of the general stile"-- that is, some reference to the external world, of which historical events
are one possibility, other types of literature another (Letters, JA to Cassandra Austen, 4Feb. 1813).
We get the same view, of course, in Northanger Abbey, but with a greater ambiguity that creates a
tension not ultimately resolved within the novel. This arises from Catherine's own behavior. She is able
instinctively to emulate some of the forensic operations of history without ever developing a clear
understanding of what it is that historians do. She sees only the surface, the final product, the weighty tomes,
as signified in her famous speech to the Tilneys about why she cannot be fond of history.
"I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of
popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly
anywomen at all--it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of
itmust be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs--the chiefof
all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books."
But Catherine Morland is not her creator. The speech Austen puts into the heroine's mouth is followed
by a defense of history, significantly in the voice of another woman, Eleanor Tilney, who is both "fond"
ofhistory and understands the imaginative processes that must go into the making of it.
"Historians, you think," said Miss Tilney, "are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display
imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history--and am very well contented to take the false with
the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be
as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one's own observation; and
as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be
well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made--and probably with much greater,
ifthe production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, orAlfred
the Great." (108-110)
 Eleanor's response is at least as important as Catherine's outburst, but it is much less frequently cited.
(12) If Eleanor abdicates to others the responsibility of making judgments between false and true, then she
atleast affirms the possibility of historical knowledge; hers is a thoroughly Humean, common-sense
positionthat permits probable statements to be made about the "real" past while preserving the literary ability
toevoke an emotional response and thereby make that past worth the mental effort of recovery.
Eleanor's conciliatory and moderate position is almost immediately trumped by her brother's more
pedantic attack on Catherine's use of the word "nice" and his pompous reference to "'our most distinguished
historians,'" by which Robertson, Hume and Gibbon may be intended, all products of thesame neoclassical
tendency in historiography that gets Catherine's gothic goat. This has a harder edge andit partially undoes
Eleanor's soft-sell of history. As a result, in the aftermath of this conversation, Catherineis no more
persuaded to read history than before. What she does do, however, is start to act like a historian without
realizing it, for the mental reconstruction and search for evidence she undertakes in her quest to solve the
mystery of Mrs. Tilney is at least as much the researching of a fictional past as the imagining of areal one;
and Catherine, like the reader, does not yet know that it is imaginary. It is not the natural setting of Eleanor's
grove that excites her interest so much as the man-made, evidentiary setting of the parish church, with its
monument to Mrs. Tilney, "the highly strained epitaph, in which every virtue was ascribedto her by the
inconsolable husband, who must have been in some way or other her destroyer ..." (190). Inshort, Catherine,
like a scholarly epigrapher working with limited surviving evidence, has read her sourceand drawn
conclusions from it--they are simply the wrong ones. (13)
Now I do not mean to suggest, in saying that Northanger Abbey is less unequivocally hostile to history
than at first we think, that Catherine's behavior is an endorsement of historical practice, because of course it
is not: Catherine does Far more damage when she tries to act the historian than when she remains firmly
fixed on Udolpho or lost in dreamy contemplation of the abbey's own, earlier gothic past. If Austen is
indicting history here, it is not so much historians' writing of it as their thinking, in particular the construction
of exaggerated theories from imperfect and decontextualized evidence. But the actions of the historian in
selecting and interpreting the past, recent or remote, come up again in subsequent novels,where they are
executed more successfully. In Pride and Prejudice especially, Elizabeth cannot help but actthe historian, and
with more care than Catherine Morland. She, too, is misled by early and misleading evidence when trying to
convince her sister Jane of Darcy's reported bad behavior toward Wickham, information she has soaked up
without questioning the source. Using the word "history" in the sense of "an account of personal events," the
sense in which the word is mainly used throughout the rest of the novels, Elizabeth doubts that Wickham
could "'invent such a history of himself as he gave me last night; names, facts, every thing mentioned
without ceremony.... Besides, there was truth in his looks'" (86). The precision and flatness of Wickham's
account rather than its rhetorical embellishment is what lends it falsecredibility. It is only later, when she has
seen all, or at least most of the evidence, that she revises her understanding of the past. She reads "a relation
of events, which, if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which bore so alarming
an affinity to his own history of himself [i.e., Wickham'sof himself], her feelings were yet more acutely
painful and more difficult of definition" (204). Elizabeth realizes that she has accepted not a history but a
chronicle of events, and missed its elisions and moral nuances. A bit later, in the wake of Darcy's hurt letter,
she has to weigh up both his claims about Wickham,and the letter's other subject, Darcy's role in
(temporarily) terminating his friend Bingley's attentions toJane Bennet. Elizabeth wanders along a lane, deep
in thought, "reconsidering events, determining probabilities, and reconciling herself as well as she could, to a
change so sudden and so important" (209). She is doing what a historian does to the past, and with
implications for her own future.
By the time we get to Mansfield Park, the divisions of genre have been softened. Austen's fourth novel
is an exercise in the successful refashioning and self-fashioning of the ill-educated but intelligent Fanny
Price into a well-mannered but morally sound heroine, just as Emma's Pygmalion-like activities withHarriet
Smith would be an exploration of what happens when such experiments go disastrously, if not irremediably,
wrong. It is through Fanny that Austen reaches the same sort of accommodation with historyas a genre that
her character has already negotiated for us, building on Elizabeth Bennet and MarianneDashwood, with the
past of recollection. The two approaches to the past --retention of the trees andintuitive, empathetic
Verstehen of the forest-- intersect in the above-cited observation of the Bertramsisters, whose rote
recollection of facts is no more meaningful or verifiable than Wickham's "invented" history.
At first it looks, so Far as attitudes to history are concerned, as if Fanny may prove another unwilling
vessel, passively and grudgingly digesting her lessons without showing much spark. We are told that
MissLee doles out a daily ration of history for her to read aloud, but that it is Edmund who picks the works to
which she really responds. Miss Price is decidedly not in training for a heroine but rather to be a silent,
dutiful fixture of Lady Bertram's drawing room and a sop to Sir Thomas's marginal sense of
familialresponsibility. In short, it seems that all we have in Fanny is Catherine Morland on Ritalin.
By the end of the novel, however, we have something very different. Fanny's reading in both
biography and history pays dividends, where Julia and Maria's memories of kings have long since faded.
Henry Crawford, one half of the charming serpent in Sir Thomas Bertram's Eden, is a clever fraud capable
ofreciting lines from Shakespeare with feeling but admitting, like the Bertram sisters, that he cannot
remember when he actually occasioned to read or see a complete play. And as for Lady Bertram, whenHenry
and Edmund interrupt her being read to by Fanny out of Henry Kill, she has not the faintest clue asto the
historical identity of the character in the play (336 ff).
Fanny, in contrast, is by now a retentive and critical teacher in her own right. Her brief return home
after many years allows her to begin molding her sister Susan into what she must eventually become, a
Fanny substitute at Mansfield Park. With fewer resources at hand, Fanny tries to pass on to Susan that which
she received from Edmund and Miss Lee. She joins a circulating library --her declaration of independence
since it makes her for the first time the chooser of books--and she tries to nurture in Susan a love of
biography and poetry, balanced by the graveness of history proper. (14) Susan has less natural inclinationto
reading than Fanny, but this only makes the older sister's mediating role between book and listener allthe
more striking. "Fanny was her oracle," Austen writes. "What Fanny told her of former times, dwelt more on
her mind than the pages of Goldsmith" (15) (418-19).
Mansfield Park closes in the conventional Austen way, that is to say with a rather rapid resolution and
indication of what happens to the characters. After all that has been done to rehabilitate history in this novel,
Austen is not quite willing to go the whole distance of adopting the historian's vocabulary. Though history is
built on chronology, she refuses, as she puts it, to assign "dates" to Edmund's recovery fromMary Crawford
and his courtship of Fanny, "that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own" (470). The reader of Austen's
juvenile history of England will instantly recall its subtitle. Apparently, there are to be no dates in this history
either.
In Emma and Persuasion we get a further nod in the historian's direction, not only in the increasing
and repeated use of the word "history" again as a synonym for one character's relations of the past to another
orothers (this is especially accentuated in Persuasion) but in the choice of character names. Of all the names
to give Jane Fairfax, Emma's foil and her well-mannered but cool opposite, why that? The name Fairfax
resonates of the civil war parliamentary commander, and in case we miss the point, her father turns out tobe
a valiant army officer. That Austen is well aware of her characters' names and their connections tohistory is
made even more obvious in Persuasion. Sir Walter Elliot, an improvident baronet obsessed withhis ancestry
to a degree that rivals even Lady Catherine de Burgh, a man fixated on reading and annotating his copy of
the Baronetage, naturally thinks of family names as historical. When the name of "Wentworth"is mentioned
to him by Mr. Shepherd, Sir Walter's instant response is to diminish the man's social standingby asserting his
utter insignificance to past or present, using a standard of measurement derived from books like the
Baronetage and alluding to a very real and famous seventeenth-century family. The curate Wentworth,
brother of the naval captain, is from a family "'quite unconnected; nothing to do with theStratford family.
One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common'" (23). This naming process is not
at all accidental. Once again Goldsmith's history, which concentrates heavily on the Stuarts (to whom, unlike
the violent Tudors, Austen was much attached), may have been a hard influenceto shake off. (16)
Secondly, it is in Persuasion that we finally do get dates, placed explicitly in the text of the novel
(Roberts100). The Napoleonic setting intrudes, though there is a peaceful lull, both in Captain Wentworth's
references to "'the year Six'" (1806), and in the novel's concluding warnings of future wars; if the army
figures peripherally in other novels, the Navy is prominent here, even down to the last sentence, when
private and public intermix--the navy is that profession "which is, if possible, more distinguished in
itsdomestic virtues than in its national importance. (17)
Thirdly and most significantly, we have yet another instance of Humean skepticism applied to history
in the hands of a heroine. Anne Elliot, we learn is an even shrewder evaluator of evidence than Elizabeth
Bennet. Unlike the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, who evaluates evidence piece by piece, Anne is unwilling
to take even collections of discrete and disconnected clues as definitive, for she has a much more thoroughly
doubtful turn of mind toward the past in general while recognizing that, for a woman atleast, it can never be
excised. So far as her cousin William Walter Elliot, Esq. is concerned, she immediately has difficulty
squaring the hints of bad associates and evil habits in his past, barely hinted inhis personal "history" with his
superficially agreeable and polite behavior in the present. "She distrusted the past, if not the present" (160-
61). Unlike Emma, she needs no Mr. Knightley to make her aware that young Elliot, like Frank Churchill
before him, is socially agreable rather than truly amiable.
Like Anne Elliot, and unlike Catherine Morland, we need to be wary of proceeding from fragmentary
evidence to sweeping generalizations. It is salutary to recall that T. B. Macaulay and several subsequent
commentators once believed Samuel Johnson (with whom Jane Austen shared a counter-cultural dislike of
Elizabeth I and an admiration for her rival, Mary Queen of Scots) to be uninterested in history. Closerstudy
has revealed that assumption to be quite mistaken. The recent rehabilitation of Johnson as a historical thinker
should serve as an object lesson in considering other literary icons presumed to be hostileto Clio: criticism of
the practices within a genre cannot be construed as a total rejection of the genre, much less of the field of
experience that it represents (Vance 1-4, 40-42, 173-79; Brownley 97-109).
Jane Austen was no Dr. Johnson. Wentworths and Fairfaxes aside, her pages are not full of references
to historical characters, and we know far less about the range of her historical knowledge than we do of
Johnson's. But her attitudes to the past in general and to history in particular should be treated as multi-
stranded and open to modulation if not development. In tracing the relations of history and fiction over
alonger period, we need to avoid oversimplifying the position of individual novelists such as Austen,
thecomplexity of whose views, like the past itself, require of us both sensible analysis of the parts and
asympathetic sensibility to the meaning of the whole.
NOTES
(1.) I am grateful to Juliet McMaster, Isobel Grundy, Bruce Stovel, and Sarah Emsley for comments
onearlier drafts of this essay.
(2.) I owe this point to audience commentary at the Edmonton chapter of the Jane Austen Society of
NorthAmerica, March 27 2004. It is not my intent in this essay to enter in to the long and growing debate
overthe relationship between history and fiction. I subscribe neither to the postmodern view that no
historicaltruth can be known and that the past is simply a construction, nor to the equally reductionist view
thatdocuments afford an entirely accurate picture of the past that can be placed at an opposite pole
fromfiction. The most interesting connections between history and fiction in my own view have always
beennot the differences but the overlaps and contiguities.
(3.) See also Roberts; Brophy; Devlin. Devlin does not take into account major educational treatises
likeEdgeworth's Practical Education which seem to me to have bad a direct influence on certain episodes
andcharacters.
(4.) On the other hand, Locke did recognize something that a female reader such as Jane Austen
wouldlater note, that "All the Entertainment and talk of History is of nothing almost but Fighting and
Killing":Locke 1989, 181. For Locke's particular prescriptions, which are similarly gendered, see Locke
1989, 322-23. In a separate work, "Of Study," however, Locke made the point that in the end "the stories
ofAlexander and Caesar, no farther than as they instruct us in the art of living well, and furnish us
withobservations of wisdom and prudence, are not one jot to be preferred to the history of Robin Hood or
theseven wise masters." Locke 1968, 409.
(5.) On the necessary qualifications of the historian as a "man versed in the world" (a requirement
whichexcluded many men as well as all women), see Guardian, 25 (9 April 1713), p. 114. The construction
ofmasculinity was also fluid at this period, with medieval and sixteenth-century emphasis on bravery
andhonor gradually giving way to an eighteenth-century stress on civility: Fletcher, 297-321, 364-75.
(6.) Hunter, 341, observes that "Conceptually, the writing of history had an impact on the context in
whichnovels began to be written and read, and as an enabling force on the scope of novels it would be hard
tooverestimate its importance."
(7.) This may be a good instance of Austen irony: Darcy does not accept that this is in fact
Elizabeth'sphilosophy, and it is precisely Elizabeth's prior careful re-examination of events (including her
own pastmisjudgments), in the light of Darcy's letter to her, that permits her to set her relationships aright. I
owethis point to Dr. Sarah Emsley. An alternative reading is possible: Nicholas Dames suggests
thatElizabeth's coming to terms with a now-irrelevant past is emblematic of a transformation by Austen of
theeighteenth-century notion of nostalgia as a pathological affliction into the modern one wherein
nostalgicrecollection of even painful events, de-traumatized by distance, acquires a healing and
pleasurablefunction. Darcy's response to Elizabeth is thus a "fulfillment and amplification" rather than a
contradictionof her "philosophy." N. Dames, "Austen's Nostalgics," Representations, 73 (Winter 2001), 117-
43,quotation at p. 129.
(8.) "Whilst children are reading the history of kings, and battles, and victories, whilst they are
learningtables of chronology and lessons of geography by rote, their inventive and their reasoning faculties
areabsolutely passive; nor are any of the facts which they learn in this manner associated with
circumstancesin real life. Edgeworth, I, 444; II, 230, 243.
 (9.) Austen also uses the passage to contrast Mary Crawford's smugly progressivist view that
"Everygeneration has its improvements" (86) with Fanny's regret that the chapel's traditional family services,
"avaluable part of former times" have been abandoned by Mr Rushworth.
(10.) Robert Henry's History of Great Britain (1771-93); the portion for Saturday, which Austen says
inher letter will be more interesting than Friday's "commerce and coin" section, was, as Chapman
quotes(Letters, notes, no. 26) devoted to "the history of the manners, virtues, vices, remarkable
customs,language, dress, diet and diversions of the people."
(11.) In a conversation on 29 April 1778, recorded by Boswell, both Samuel Johnson and
WilliamRobertson had criticized Henry for not having concentrated sufficiently on the "history of
manners"(Vance 166-67).
(12.) Gilbert and Gubar 132 overlook Eleanor's response, or rather refer to Catherine being
"severelycriticized" without distinguishing Eleanor's criticism, which is friendly and persuasive rather than
severe,from the more ponderous advice of Henry; Harris 26-27 similarly ignores Eleanor's riposte in
herdiscussion of the passage.
(13.) It will be apparent from this account that l cannot agree with the opening to Harris's reading of
thenovel (Harris 1 ff.), in which Catherine, "free from the biases of traditional education, ...
courageouslytests her hypothesis that General Tilney is a murderer", or that she picks her own way through
"falsehoodand hypocrisy. I do agree with Harris that there are clear echoes of Locke herein, especially in the
place ofmemory (but not in his distrust of the imagination); however, there are equally strong and much
moreimmediate debts to Hume and Edgeworth, the former not considered at all, and the latter
overlookedexcept as a fictional influence, and a minor one at that.
(14.) The circulating library figures in female leisure activity, less positively, in the unfinished
Sanditon.Minor Works (403).
(15.) Goldsmith might well be that nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England that Austen had
inmind in her defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey. We know she had been reading History of
England,in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son and no doubt was familiar with his later History
ofEngland in 1791, when she wrote her own abridged history. We know from her brother that "her
readingwas very extensive in history and belles-lettres". She also owned a set of Hume's History of England,
hadprobably read the Scottish historian William Robertson, and may have had some familiarity with
Gibbon'sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Her nephew Austen-Leigh (p. 78) tells us, "In history she
followedthe old guides--Goldsmith, Hume, and Robertson. Critical enquiry into the usually received
statements ofthe old historians was scarcely begun. The history of the early kings of Rome had not yet been
dissolvedinto legend. Historic characters lay before the readers eyes in broad light or shade, not much broken
up bydetails. The virtues of King Henry VIII were yet undiscovered, nor had much light been thrown on
theinconsistencies of Queen Elizabeth; the one was held to be an unmitigated tyrant, and an embodied
BlueBeard; the other a perfect model of wisdom and policy. Jane, when a girl, had strong political
opinions,especially about the affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement defender
ofCharles I and his grandmother Mary; but I think it was rather from an impulse of feeling than from
anyenquiry into the evidences by which they must be condemned or acquitted."
(16.) The name of the foolish cuckold Mr Rushworth, husband of Maria Bertram, may have
beenborrowed front the Parliamentarian historian of the civil war.
(17.) While writing Persuasion, Austen had received a letter front James Stanier Clarke proposing that
shededicate a historical romance to Prince Leopold. She replied that though such a work might well be
ofmore profit than "such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in" Austen could not write
aserious romance except to save her life and "I am sure I should be hung before the last chapter." This is
arejection of what we call the historical novel rather than of history, but one wonders if" thiscorrespondence
was not on her mind as she wrote the novel. Letters, Austen to Clarke, 1 April 1816;Gilbert and Gubar 133
misread this by jumping from this quotation--which is not about historical realitybut about historical
romance--to the conclusion that Austen "refused to take historical 'reality' seriously".
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Daniel Woolf is Professor of History at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His
publicationsinclude The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (1990), Reading History in Early
Modern England(2000), and The Social Circulation of the Past (2003).