Free What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved by John Mullan

than the shape of her body as revealed and concealed by her dress. The aesthetic appreciation of a woman’s shape, or shapeliness, seems, in Sense and Sensibility , to have been shared by the author herself. Elinor Dashwood, we are told, has ‘a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure’. Her sister is ‘still handsomer’. ‘Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking’ (I. x). The use of ‘correct’ here, which is surely the author’s judgement, is strange to us, implying that there is some culturally agreed standard for body-shape, by which observers would reasonably judge actual women.
    Egged on by Mrs Weston (‘She is loveliness itself. Mr. Knightley, is not she?’) Mr Knightley actually agrees with her superlatives. ‘“I have not a fault to find with her person,” he replied. “I think her all you describe. I love to look at her.”’ These two characters could not have this conversation if either were conscious that Mr Knightley was a possible partner for Emma. He is indeed Emma’s ‘old friend’ – and we might remember this when ‘friend’ becomes the word that prods him into proposing to her some nine months later: ‘as a friend, indeed, you may command me,’ she says to him. ‘“As a friend!” repeated Mr. Knightley. “Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—Stay, yes, why should I hesitate?”’ (III. xiii)
    There is a kind of appreciative looking at a young woman – and not at her face only – that is a quite proper exercise in taste. It can be done foolishly or wrongly. We should note that Sir Walter Elliot greatly fancies himself a connoisseur of female beauty. And there is something wrong with Mr Darcy’s first expression of what he sees in Elizabeth: ‘Catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me .”’ (I. iii) He is fancying himself an imperturbable judge. ‘Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing.’ Elizabeth does not please his taste, having ‘hardly a good feature in her face’, but then ‘her dark eyes’ correct his judgement. Everyone knows about the tingling dialogue between the two of them, but the complexity of feeling between them is truly expressed in a drama of looking. It is through looks that the impression of something between them has been given.
    Famously, it is really set in motion by Elizabeth’s walk across the fields, and Mr Darcy’s ‘admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion’.
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    Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy’s eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange. (I. x)
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    She supposes it is all about taste or distaste, as when Miss Bingley invites her to walk up and down the room with her – perhaps, Mr Darcy suggests, ‘because you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking’. Yet it is about more than taste.
    Even Mr Darcy senses that something is happening: on Elizabeth’s last day at Netherfield, he ‘would not even look at her’; when they meet in Meryton we find him ‘beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth’ (I. xv). Looks are risky. His looks escape his intentions. His looking indeed becomes so attentive that it make others observant. A great watcher of others’ looks, Charlotte Lucas (now Collins) wonders explicitly if he is in love