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

declares himself to Emma and expects her response to what is implicitly a proposal. ‘He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her’ (III. xiii). It is an extraordinary grammatical usage: to ‘look the question’. As if only looking can express meaning. Something similar happens when Captain Wentworth places his letter before Anne Elliot in the room at the White Hart, and she sees and cannot misinterpret his ‘eyes of glowing entreaty’ ( Persuasion , II. xi). A substitute for speech, the letter concludes with an acknowledgement that speech will hardly be necessary to communicate her response. ‘A word, a look will be enough,’ it says. Soon they meet again, in the company of others. ‘He joined them; but, as if irresolute whether to join or to pass on, said nothing, only looked. Anne could command herself enough to receive that look, and not repulsively. The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side.’ Wentworth is right. After all the elusiveness of people’s looks in Jane Austen’s fiction – after all the uncertain, anxious, puzzled, mistaken looking that has gone on – here finally, satisfyingly . . . a look is enough.

FIVE
    Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?
    A sudden seizure of a different nature from any thing foreboded by her general state, had carried her off after a short struggle. The great Mrs. Churchill was no more.
    Emma , III. ix
    If we except the little pre-history of the Dashwood family in the first chapter of Sense and Sensibility , and the odd case of Lord Ravenshaw’s grandmother (of which more later), there are only two deaths that occur within Jane Austen’s novels, and one of these is of a character whom we never meet. The two people who die are Dr Grant in Mansfield Park and Mrs Churchill in Emma . Neither is lamented; both deaths are indeed calculated to make us consider how we might fail to grieve at others’ mortality. In the case of Mrs Churchill, the consideration is comic. She is the most powerful absentee character in all Austen’s fiction. We never see or hear her; she exerts influence over her adopted son, Frank Churchill, mostly by feigning various illnesses, but always off stage. Then suddenly she dies from an unspecified ‘seizure’, though we are told that it is something different from anything of which she has long been complaining (III. ix). Even the malade imaginaire is susceptible to the reaper. She is dead, but she is vindicated. The inhabitants of Highbury, none of whom have ever met her, respond with peculiarly disingenuous feeling: ‘Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow.’
    Dr Grant’s death in Mansfield Park is more frankly unregretted. In the rounding-up that happens in the novel’s closing phases, Dr and Mrs Grant, who first brought the amoral, chaos-causing Crawfords to Mansfield, have returned to London, where Dr Grant has found ecclesiastical advancement in Westminster. His self-satisfaction is not to last. Soon he ‘brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week’ (III. xvii). It is thoroughly poetic justice: the gastronome clergyman kills himself with gluttony at the height of his contentment. We expect deaths like this in a different kind of novel – in Fielding, say, where the irascible Captain Blifil, who has married the wealthy Squire Allworthy’s sister, also dies of ‘an apoplexy . . . just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by Mr. Allworthy’s death’. 1 Dr Grant’s demise is comically smuggled in from a different, moralistic and satirical, kind of narrative. And it is not just poetic justice. His death also serves the other characters’ wishes and the author’s narrative purposes. For it means that the two half-sisters, Mrs Grant and Mary Crawford, can