Free Jane Austen For Dummies by Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray

fact of life in Austen’s day. A nobleman who acted pleasantly toward a social inferior was considered admirable and courteous. In other words, the aristocrat, though higher in rank than the person he or she is addressing, doesn’t pull rank. This concept is known as condescension — being nice to those who rank lower than you do.
    But the characters in Austen’s novels didn’t always follow this notion. If you take a look at Lady Catherine in
Pride and Prejudice,
you see her acting in the worst condescending way: She gives Mr. Collins his orders to marry, tells him what kind of woman he should marry, and then tells the new Mrs. Collins how to care for her poultry. Lady Catherine’s behavior is anything but pleasant. Mr. Collins idiotically observes that Lady Catherine “‘. . . likes to have the distinction of rank preserved’” (2:7). His inability to see the difference between friendly condescension and the snobbish superiority that Lady Catherine displays is another mark of his stupidity.
    Through Lady Catherine’s behavior, Austen reminds us that even titled folks could let their titles and status go to their heads. Instead of behaving the way she should—with “condescension” that is pleasant — Lady Catherine is proud, overbearing, and never lets anyone forget that she is the daughter of an earl.
    An example of proper condescension is seen in
Emma
’s Mr. Knightley. The richest man in Highbury and from an old and distinguished family of the gentry, Mr. Knightley, while not titled, behaves with kindness and generosity to those below him socially and economically: He quietly sends apples to the poor Bates family; he advises the young farmer Robert Martin who seeks him out; and he even dances with Harriet, a young woman of uncertain parentage, when she is left as the only wallflower at the Crown Inn Ball. Mr. Knightley understands and practices condescension in the best possible way.
    Growing the Novel
    The novel was a new literary genre that Jane Austen was familiar with growing up. In a letter to her sister, she reminds Cassandra that “‘our family . . . are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’” (December 18–19, 1798). “Not ashamed of being” novel readers? Why would someone have to be ashamed of reading novels?
    Well, as the novel developed in England, it was sometimes viewed suspiciously because imagined characters and plots were presented as real people and situations. England had enough problems with overactive imaginations in the 17th century, when Puritan soldiers, fueled by intense emotionalism or fancied inspirations, marched against the king. (This was England’s Civil War, 1642– 1649.) Thus, some people viewed novels, works of the imagination that are presented as realistic, as a throwback to that dangerous “fancy” that caused England to have a king beheaded in 1649. It may seem a stretch to connect political unrest with literature, but many folks felt that the fancy or imagination that caused the first event (political unrest) contaminated the second event (the appearance of novels, which are works of the imagination that are presented as if they were realistic and true). The imagination was viewed with so much suspicion, that Dr. Johnson’s popular fictional work of 1759,
Rasselas,
contains a chapter called “The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” (Chapter 44). To avoid having their books appear as products of the imagination, early experimenters in novel writing presented their fiction as “true stories” that the authors claimed to have merely found and edited. For example, in 1722, Daniel Defoe offered
Moll Flanders
as the “Memorandums” of an actual woman who used the name Moll Flanders as a guise because she is so well known, and himself as the mere editor who fixed up her immodest language. But Defoe actually invented the character and plot;