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

with her friend.
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    She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind. (II. ix)
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    It still surprises some readers to find that looks in Austen’s novels can so openly express what we might call sexual attraction. Just such is the look that Anne gets from the unknown gentleman on the steps to the beach in Lyme: ‘he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of’ (I. xii). She has had ‘the bloom and freshness of youth restored’, ‘the animation of eye’, and she knows just how she is being looked at by this stranger in a public place. It is a look that is open enough to be seen and interpreted by Captain Wentworth too.
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    It was evident that the gentleman (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.’ (I. xii)
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    It is a look of admiration that Mr Elliot later admits to, though when he does so Anne remembers ‘another person’s look also’. These looks keep coming back, as when Mr Elliot enters the confectioner’s shop in Bath.
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    Captain Wentworth recollected him perfectly. There was no difference between him and the man who had stood on the steps at Lyme, admiring Anne as she passed, except in the air and look and manner of the privileged relation and friend. He came in with eagerness, appeared to see and think only of her. (II. vii)
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    Mr Elliot fusses away, unaware that his own role in the novel is to spark Captain Wentworth’s jealousy.
    This idea of a man appreciating a woman, expressed in the wordless encounter between Anne and Mr Elliot in Lyme, is put to unsettling use in Mansfield Park , when Edmund reports to Fanny his father’s appreciation of her looks.
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    â€˜Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!—and your figure—nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it—it is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle’s admiration, what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman.’
    â€˜Oh! don’t talk so, don’t talk so,’ cried Fanny, distressed by more feelings than he was aware of. (II. iii)
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    Edmund blunders, not knowing of Fanny’s love for him, and doubly so in talking of her being ‘worth looking at’. He alerts her both to the possibility of her being attractive, and to the fact that he does not look at her with a lover’s eyes. This perceptive yet unseeing registering of another person’s physical attractions can even distinguish a woman looking at a man, though this is much rarer. Emma is unique in allowing its heroine to appreciate the masculine ‘figure’ in a comparably candid manner, when she looks at Mr Knightley at the dance at the Crown. ‘His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body’s eyes; and, excepting her own partner, there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him’ (II. ii). It is as close as Emma can go to recognising something beyond friendship.
    In the scene where Mr Knightley and Emma finally acknowledge their true feelings for each other, looks take over. Looking in Austen is perhaps never more charged with meaning than when Mr Knightley