Mr Collins uses his library at Hunsford for ‘reading and writing, and looking out of the window in his own book-room, which fronted the road. The room in which the ladies sat was backwards’ (P&P, p. 117). The very deliberate positioning of his ‘book-room’ is emphasised by the ladies’ location at the back of the house; Collins, a keen social aspirant, chooses a room with a window facing the road, so he can read and write in the public eye. For him, the ownership of a private reading space is socially akin to the ‘patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh’ (P&P, p. 45). Newey notes that Austen exploits her characters’ relationships with books ‘to reveal the imperfections hidden by their social façades’, and Collins’ reading room makes for one such ‘façade’; through a literal window into his life, he presents himself as a socially significant figure with money to purchase books and time to read them. Collins, like General Tilney, exploits his library as a physical means of showcasing his social status, but Austen readily exposes the fragility of this; having already revealed that Mr Collins is not a great reader, she insists on calling it a ‘book-room’, thus falling short of Northanger’s ‘library’ and undermining his claim.
Another such revelation of social ‘imperfections’ comes, paradoxically, from the use of libraries, not as public displays, but as private retreats. Mr Bennet is rarely seen outside of his library; his most significant episodes in Pride and Prejudice, including Bingley’s first visit, the argument over Collins’ proposal, and even his approval of Darcy’s engagement to Elizabeth, take place among his bookshelves. He prefers solitude, though; when Mr Collins takes up residence there, Bennet is ‘most anxious to get rid of him, and have his library to himself’ (P&P, p. 51). Darryl Jones maintains that Bennet’s library ‘has a metonymic function, acting as guarantor of his social status’; however, while this may be its public function, Austen presents several private moments which actually prove the library to be Mr Bennet’s means of escaping a lifestyle that he detests. The Bennet marriage is not a loving one: ‘very early in their marriage […] all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown’ (P&P, p. 162). Instead of his wife, Mr Bennet’s ‘principal enjoyments’ arise from his ‘fond[ness] of the country and of books’, so he devotes time to those; when his family return late from Netherfield, he is still reading, for ‘with a book he was regardless of time’(P&P, p. 162; p. 10). As such, I concur with Ivor Morris, that when Mr Bennet is ‘tiring of his family, he devotes himself to his books’; evading the social events that his wife treasures, he retreats into his library to pursue his real love. To this end, Austen uses the social grandiose of a private library to reveal the fractures of its owner’s personal life.
By contrast, circulating libraries provoke different perspectives on the subject of reading. During Austen’s lifetime, they offered readers an ‘autonomy of choice’ not afforded at home. This freedom created a fear of promiscuity and literary impropriety, expressed in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775); Sir Anthony Absolute calls the circulating library ‘an ever-green tree of diabolical knowledge’. Austen was a member of her local Basingstoke circulating library from 1798, and accordingly the treatment of these institutions in Pride and Prejudice satirises popular abhorrence to them. When Mr Collins is presented with a novel to read aloud to his cousins, he ‘started back’ because ‘everything pronounced it to be from a circulating library’; he adopts Sir Anthony’s view of circulating libraries as hotbeds of indecency, and refuses to be associated with one (P&P, p. 50). Literally judging a book by its cover, he physically recoils for fear of scandal based on popular discourse, similar to John Thorpe’s disgust at Camilla, based on Burney’s marriage to a foreigner. Austen further satirises this sentiment in Northanger Abbey; when Catherine announces that ‘something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London’, Eleanor Tilney ‘immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields’, until Henry explains that Catherine’s words ‘relate only to a circulating library’ (NA, pp. 99-100). Austen’s humorous parallel between circulating libraries and battlefields makes for sharp satire of a society where reading had intense social implications.
In both Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, reading, especially of novels, is inescapably gendered. During Austen’s career, ‘the novel was a literary form written by, for and about women’, and there remained a ‘dominant cultural view of novels as disreputable’; thus Austen’s discussion of novel-reading, within novels which are themselves written by a female author, is inevitably bound in gendered rhetoric. Austen uses reading as a means of addressing a broader social discourse; the male characters who disapprove of novels also treat women with disdain. John Thorpe undermines Catherine’s novel-reading habits: ‘I never read novels; I have something else to do’ (NA, p. 43). Moments later, he tells his mother she ‘look[s] like an old witch’ and his younger sisters ‘that they both looked very ugly’ (NA, p. 44). Mr Collins, in an identical turn of phrase, ‘protested that he never read novels’; so, when asked to read to his cousins, uses the opportunity to enforce his own tastes upon them, with a copy of the misogynistic Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women (1776) (P&P, p. 50). In ‘Sermon IV’, James Fordyce considers women’s reading; he admires Samuel Richardson, but ‘Beside the beautiful productions of that incomparable pen, there seem to me to be very few, in the style of the Novel, that you can read with safety, and yet fewer that you can read with advantage [sic].’ Mary Wollstonecraft ‘would not allow girls to peruse’ the Sermons, and Austen also makes a point of undermining Fordyce; Lydia Bennet ‘gaped as he opened the volume’, interrupting after just three pages (P&P, p. 50). Katie Halsey connects this moment in Pride and Prejudice with Austen’s defence of novels in Northanger Abbey, suggesting it to be a ‘response’ to ‘Sermon IV’. In a brief interlude from the plot, Austen laments how young women express ‘momentary shame’ when reading novels in public, but ‘had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator […] how proudly would she have produced the book’ (NA, pp. 32). She attacks the Spectator for containing ‘improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living’; Fordyce, meanwhile, recommends to ‘both sexes’ the ‘elegant pens’ of the Spectator, and thus Austen’s words may be a direct response (NA, pp. 33). This exemplifies how Austen exploits her characters as a means of addressing the gendered social dialogue concerning reading.
However, Austen does not praise all reading, or even all novels, but establishes a careful framework of how and what one should read. At opposite ends of the literary scale lie Gothic devotee Catherine Morland and bookish dullard Mary Bennet. Neither reads correctly; Catherine’s taste for ‘horrid’ novels gives her ridiculous expectations, but Mary’s hours of studying improving books prompts Halsey to call her ‘priggishly tedious’ (NA, p. 35). Novels inform Catherine’s expectations of a world which she has barely experienced; she is delighted that Henry’s Gothic description of the Abbey ‘is just like a book!’ (NA, pp. 137-38). Catherine, a fictional character, misreads her own story; she is ‘an heroine’, but belongs in an Austen novel, not a Radcliffe one, so incorrectly predicts her own ending (NA, p. 11). When she guesses at General Tilney’s secret, Henry asks if ‘our education prepare[s] us for such atrocities?’ – Catherine’s recent education comprises Gothic literature and social engagements, but she bases her perceptions on the former, rather than observing the ‘real’ story around her (NA, p. 171). That said, Richard Gill and Susan Gregory rightly point out that Austen ‘in no way denies that a Gothic romance may be a good read’ – crucially, and contrary to what conduct books might suggest, Catherine’s reading habits and consequent folly do not lead to ruin, but ‘perfect happiness’ in marriage (NA, p. 219). Thus Northanger Abbey is not a conduct book, but Austen ironically ends the novel by inviting the reader to draw moral conclusions as if it were: ‘I leave it to be settled […] whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience’ (NA, p. 220).
Mary Bennet, meanwhile, reads solely for improvement; Richardson notes that she ‘exemplifies the error of reading for superficial knowledge and memorising set passages for the purpose of showing off’, but cannot actually say anything interesting. When Mr Bennet asks his middle daughter’s opinion, given ‘you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books, and make extracts’, Mary ‘wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how’, as her habit of copying out extracts from intellectual books has left her unoriginal (P&P, p. 6). Mary is often forgotten among her intelligent older and silly younger sisters, because she constantly shuts herself away; when Lydia plans to walk to Meryton, ‘every sister except Mary agreed to go with her’ (P&P, p. 51). Mary contrasts to her sister Elizabeth, who prefers reading to card games but nevertheless attends and enjoys social events. Austen herself was a keen party-goer; after one ball in 1795, she wrote in her diary ‘There were twenty Dances, & I danced them all [sic]’. Austen suggests that reading is but one important component of a lively existence; thus, Mary is dull and witless, having misplaced her faith in improving literature. This is echoed by Catherine Morland’s mother who, not understanding her daughter’s misery since coming home from Northanger, recommends a ‘very clever essay […] about young girls who have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance – The Mirror, I think’ (NA, p. 210). Halsey recognises that Mrs Morland sees such texts as holding ‘a greater authority than her own’, and thus relies on them as ‘books from which you can learn true wisdom’. The volume is abandoned once Henry appears, again showing the value of practical efforts over book-learning in certain situations – something that Mary Bennet is yet to understand. As such, while Austen generally advocates reading, she offers a very specific understanding of what makes for correct literary habits.
The subject of reading pervades Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey; Austen examines the social dialogue around the act of reading and also the physical impedimenta associated with it. In the various spheres of these novels – the more sedate social life of Longbourn and enclosed nature of Northanger against the bustle of Bath – the subject of reading dwells within domestic and social settings. Thus, Austen is able to exploit reading as a means of revealing the fractures in characters’ social façades. Within this discourse, Austen engages in the gendered relationship between reading and genre, elevating the novel and rejecting misogynistic conduct texts. Her portrayal of reading adheres to a very specific view of what and how to read; there is nothing wrong with books that provide ‘nothing like useful knowledge’, but no one can survive on books alone, of any genre (NA, p. 11). Austen treats the subject of reading as a device to illustrate further her characters’ portraits, a means of holding their personal lives against their public personas.
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