Cleverly Concise

Julia Yost
Wiseblood Press, 2024; 75 pp., $8 (paperback)

A Review of Jane Austen’s Darkness

Jane Austen valued brevity in speech, and she at times directed near-merciless satire at the ineloquent verbosity of her most conniving characters. With precise linguistic economy, Austen’s narrators can deliver a swift critique in a few words. No doubt, the cleverly concise form of Julia Yost’s eloquent reflections on what she terms “Jane Austen’s darkness” would have delighted the author herself. 

As Yost observes, Austen also warns against aiming sarcastic remarks at the vulnerable. Mr. Knightley, in Austen’s novel Emma, sternly admonishes Emma Woodhouse for coldly and sarcastically insulting the impoverished Miss Bates. The Greek root of our word “sarcasm”, sarkazein, means “to tear flesh.” The ironic scalpel-like fine edge of moral satire differs from the jagged blade of a careless sarcastic attack. In her darkest moments, Austen could tip from satire into sarcasm, and Yost directly acknowledges this reality with refreshing honesty.

Yost quickly moves through Austen’s novels—Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, plus Austen’s unfinished fragment Sanditon—at what sometimes feels like a breakneck speed. She attempts to cover much in the small space of 75 pages, which results in her clever concision but also leaves a few gaps. More attention could have been paid to the darker aspects of the theological language in Sense and Sensibility, for example. As Anne Richards points out, the villain Willoughby’s speech near the novel’s end contains not only the words “God,” “soul,” “saint,” “heaven,” and “atonement,” but also “devil” and “diabolical.” Yost’s argument leans heavily on D. W. Harding’s 1998 “Regulated Hatred,” which she could have addressed and put aside sooner in order to engage with more recent Austen scholarship. For example, Yost claims Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice triumph “over darkness.” However, in 2006, Janet Todd argued Elizabeth Bennet’s “father’s anxiety and her own coolness, together with the sense of mastery still clinging to Darcy, give a slight chill to the sunny end” of Pride and Prejudice. Even if Yost disagrees with Todd’s assessment, engaging with Todd would bring greater depth and complexity to Yost’s treatment of this most famous of Austen novels.

Yost’s argument is strongest in her analysis of Austen’s final two novels—Emma and Persuasion—works written as Austen was facing chronic health concerns, which likely intensified the darker tones of her prose. Emma was published in 1815 when Austen was already coping with serious and recurrent headaches. Then in 1816 Austen experienced intense symptoms of what scholars believe was either lymphoma, Addison’s disease, or lupus. Yet, Austen kept writing up to her death on July 18, 1817; Persuasion went to print in December of that same year. Yost’s attention to “Austen’s darkness” does justice to the difficult circumstances under which she labored in her last years.

Emma

By far, Yost makes her most original observations while analyzing the darkness of Emma, an apparently bright text. Critics have tended to view Emma as a lighter novel, due to its witty and confident eponymous heroine. C.S. Lewis categorizes Emma as “high comedy” in his “Note on Jane Austen,” for example. Yost admits that Emma at first appears “sunnier” and “is often called an idyll,” but she then quickly turns to the ominous way “death … shadows the village of Highbury,” close by Hartfield estate, where Emma lives with her elderly, ailing, and widowed father.

At the crux of Yost’s argument is another widowed parent living with an unmarried adult child in Emma, Mrs. Bates, whose daughter Miss Bates apologizes for the “dark staircase” of their cramped quarters. Yost notes the parallels between Mrs. Bates, as the widow of Rev. Bates, and Jane Austen’s mother, also the widow of an Anglican clergyman. Both the fictional Mrs. Bates and the real Mrs. Austen were left in precarious situations by the deaths of their husbands. Both the fictional and the real widow needed to learn to live as single parents with their unmarried daughters (though in Mrs. Austen’s case, there were two: Jane and her elder sister Cassandra). Was Jane Austen embarrassed by the tight, dark stairwell of Chawton Cottage? Yost raises this question implicitly, though she also acknowledges the Austen women were helped financially by Austen’s brother, Edward Austen-Knight, whereas Mrs. Bates has no son in Emma. Yost draws attention to the ways Miss Bates’ social and economic precarity make her sensitive to the suffering of others. Amidst Miss Bates’ rambling dialogue we learn that the Rev. Bates’ former clerk, John Abdy, is bedridden with rheumatism. As Yost cryptically observes, “Poverty can kill.”

In another terse sentence, Yost draws attention to the chronic emotional and physical “agony” of Miss Bates’s niece, stating bluntly: “Jane gets head-aches.” Jane Fairfax is the object of Emma’s envy due to, among other things, Jane’s superior piano playing. But Jane has acquired this skill at such a high level because she may need to eke out a living as a governess. Governesses would make approximately thirty-five pounds per year, in strong contrast to Emma Woodhouse’s economic independence as an heiress of 30,000 pounds. It is another heiress, Mrs. Elton, the meddling and presumptuous woman married to Highbury’s newest clergyman, who takes concrete steps to place Jane Fairfax into service within what Jane herself satirically calls the “governess-trade.” Yost refers to Mrs. Elton’s roots in Bristol, a notorious slave port that drew the critical attention of abolitionists who lived in or near the city, like poet Hannah More and philosopher Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, but misses an opportunity to draw a connection between Mrs. Elton’s familial connection to Bristol and her eagerness to traffic Jane.

However, Yost does very effectively draw attention to the overall patterns of dark suffering in the lives of those who exist in the shadow of Emma’s brilliance. This aspect of Emma has remained largely understudied, and Yost importantly draws sympathetic attention to those characters leading lives of not-so-quiet desperation in the novel. Miss Bates, at first glance, is an apparently minor character, but she is key to what Yost aptly terms Emma’s “moral education.”

Persuasion

Yost builds on the theme of economic precarity through her analysis of the debt-ridden Sir Walter Elliot, the failing patriarch of Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion. She convincingly argues, “Persuasion is a novel about precarity and liquidity of assets and social forms.” Her clever pun on “liquidity”—as she considers how, in Austen’s most oceanic of novels, naval officers are displacing barons in the social structure of England—works well. This displacement happens quite literally in the case of Sir Walter Elliot, who needs to rent his ancestral country house to Admiral Croft to avoid poverty. When Yost notes that a new “professional meritocracy is forming,” she echoes the argument of Linda Bree, articulated in Bree’s introduction to the 1998 Broadview Press edition of Persuasion, without citing Bree as a source. Yost makes excellent points as she emphasizes how the “mortal risk” taken by men like Austen’s fictional Captain Wentworth during the Napoleonic wars led to their rise in wealth and status. Bree makes some of these exact same observations. Bree appears in Yost’s footnotes as an editor of Austen’s prose, but she is also a formidable literary critic and her work should be acknowledged.

The freshest observations Yost makes regarding Persuasion involve the ambiguity of its ending, a sort of darkness or obscurity with which the reader is left to wrestle. Yost makes the great point that in the ending of Persuasion Austen withholds “closure” by opening the structure of her narrative “onto the present, which opens onto the future,” including what Austen terms “the dread of a future war.” When Yost notes the prevalence of the word “providence” in Persuasion, she waxes theological, writing

If Persuasion is distinguished by its conviction of the opacity of human affairs in both prospect and retrospect, it is equally distinguished by its several direct references to providence … Trusting to Providence does not mean resting in the expectation of happy endings … Rather, it means resolution and resignation without worry for the morrow.

Here Yost suggests that the life of a woman married to a naval officer engaged in the battles of the Napoleonic wars must have involved intentional trust in God. In a world full of what Yost terms “uncertainty and violence,” one imagines marital bonds would be strengthened in crucibles of suffering and prayer. Austen’s awareness of providence in unstable times, as explained so carefully by Yost, anticipates what St. John Henry Newman would describe two decades later in his hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.” For Newman, such providential light showed him “not the distant scene” but only the next small step, amidst “encircling gloom.”

Light Shining out of Darkness

In her very last days, Jane Austen wrote “Venta,” a short, comic poem about St. Swithin, the medieval Catholic saint and patron of Winchester Cathedral, where Austen is now buried. Earlier in her life Austen had written verse within which, in the bemused style of a Horatian satirist, she laughed at her own struggles through poems with such titles as “I’ve a Pain in my Head” and “When Stretched on One’s Bed.” (Yost could have considered some of these at times sardonic, at times sprightly poems alongside her trenchant treatment of Austen’s prose fiction.) Austen’s brother Henry asserted her favorite poet was William Cowper, author of the hymn “Light Shining out of Darkness.” Throughout “Venta,” within which she cleverly imagines St. Swithin satirizing human folly, the light of her brilliant wit shines out of the darkness of her suffering.

Yost captures this dynamic of light shining out of darkness in a poignant reflection on Emma. She admires how Emma’s realization of George Knightley’s love for her arrives as “sudden clarity … like a break in the clouds.” In Yost’s apt simile of sunlight shining through dark storm clouds, she captures why readers return to Austen’s novels again and again. Though Austen acknowledges the encircling gloom with sharp realism, we sense her, time and again, undeniably pointing us to glimmers of a kindly, heavenly light.