July 2023 meeting: Jane Austen’s characters and us!

JASACT members were set a different sort of challenge for our July meeting, and it was framed like this: Which of Austen’s characters do we see as the closest to our own?  Not necessarily our favourite one, rather the one we relate to most closely – always, now, or at a particular time in our lives.

It was a smaller than usual meeting, but those who attended came up with some interesting characters to identify with.

A few members related to Marianne Dashwood. One said that as a teenager she was a total Marianne Dashwood  –  indulged, thoughtless of the feelings of others, into poetry, the piano, art and rapt in my own self importance. How embarrassing, she said. Another claimed to have an element of Marianne in her, specifically sharing Austen’s quote about Marianne towards the end of the novel: 

Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.

A third member also related to Marianne, to her sense of fun, to her “running down the hill”.

Marianne certainly won the poll, if we were counting.

Keeping to the subject of teenagers, the daughter of one of our co-founders, who has since died, said that her mother had always liked Catherine Moreland, because she related to her naiveté as a teenager.

However, teenagers grow up, and our indulged Marianne member said that now she aspires to be the widely travelled, good hearted Mrs Croft. She’s not over troubled by the social pretensions of those around her, willing to enjoy shipboard life, game enough to be driven in a gig by the accident prone Admiral and, when he was ordered to walk as a result of the gout, walked for her life (until ‘she had a blister on one of her heels as large as a three shilling piece’) to do him good. “What a woman”, said our member. “I love her”.

As for our co-founder, her daughter suggested that she had grown up to be a mix of witty Elizabeth Bennet and sensible Elinor Dashwood … which brings us to Elinor.

The member who felt she had a touch of Marianne, primarily saw herself as a mix of sensible Elinor Dashwood and positive Jane Bennet. Elinor, she said, was calm and sensible, and perhaps a bit boring; she reins in her emotions and tries not to let them control her behaviour, but she does also feel. Our member related to that. However, she said, she’s not as self-sacrificing as Elinor. Regarding her Jane Bennet side, she argued that Jane is a bit like Elinor, in that both are sensible and behave with dignity. Jane wants to think well of people, as does our member who will first assume sins of omission when things go wrong before she will believe the sins are of commission. However, while Mr Bennet says Jane and Mr Bingley are likely to exceed their income because they are too easy-going, our member relates more to sensible prudent Elinor when it comes to money. Her husband pegged her as Jane, but not in this regard she hoped! She suggested that it can be hard to make sensible characters exciting. In Persuasion, and to a degree Mansfield Park, for example, there’s no Elizabeth or Marianne to captivate us.

One of our newer members looked at the characters closer to us in age. Of those she likened herself most to Lady Russell. She didn’t relate to Lady Russell’s status (or her title) she was quick to tell us, but she saw Lady Russell as sensible and steady which is how she is also seen by family and friends. Lady Russell is called in to help the Elliots with their money problems, and she offers good advice that is also sensitive to Sir Walter’s needs. Lady Russell is seen as influential, and as the sensible one.

Another member also chose one of the more minor characters, and also, coincidentally, from Persuasion, but hers was Mrs Smith (née Miss Hamilton). She was friend of Anne’s, had tutored her. Mrs Smith had led a wonderful, extravagant life, and had had all the best things, but then she ended up with rheumatic fever, and having to move to the poorer part of Bath. Is she, our member asked, the deus ex machina whose role is to tell us all about Mr Elliot and move the plot along. Our member felt she had once been married to a Mr Elliot. She could relate to the quote:

We lived for enjoyment. I think differently now: time and sickness and sorrow have given me other notions; but at that period, I must own I saw nothing reprehensible in what Mr. Elliot was doing. ‘To do the best for himself’ passed as a duty.

Our only male member present skirted the question, and answered a few of his own:

• Who he fantasises being: the character with the large estate in Derbyshire, Mr Darcy of course.
• Who he hopes no-one would liken him to: Mr Collins, Mr Wickham, and Mr Rushworth.
• Who others might judge him to be: Henry Crawford (because people don’t know what to make of him) and Edward Ferrars (who’s a bit wishy-washy).
• Who he most identifies with: Mr Knightley (who is sensitive, caring), Henry Tilney (who is well read, kind, and did the right thing), and, dare he say it, Fanny Price (because of how she thinks and has to cope).

We followed all this with a short but sometimes lively discussion, which included our agreement that Mrs Jennings becomes more interesting and more likeable as Sense and sensibility progresses, and that more men find Marianne appealing than women do. But, our main discussion concerned Elinor with one member arguing that Elinor tells white lies and doesn’t say the things she should (such as to Willoughby near the end), and others disagreeing, defending Elinor’s kindness and sensitivity to the situations she finds herself in.

It was a topic that got us all thinking – and it was a shame so many had to miss the meeting. Who did they relate to we wondered? Were there more Mariannes, or does an Elizabeth lurk amongst us? We may never know!