Hansel and Gretel (whose lullaby is also heard in The Bookshop) believe in angels; Penelope Fitzgerald probably did, too. She certainly believes in minor phenomena like ghosts and poltergeists, and she does a great deal of thinking about religion, as is only natural for the granddaughter of bishops and the niece of a Socialist priest, a notable Roman Catholic convert and translator of the Bible, and a fiercely sceptical cryptographer. Her novels argue, quietly, over belief, and the relation between the soul and the body. ‘Because I don’t believe in this…that doesn’t mean it’s not true,’ is Frank’s position in The Beginning of Spring. The Russian priest he is listening to says to his congregation: ‘You are not only called upon to work together, but to love each other and pity each other.’ Fitzgerald has described herself as ‘deeply pessimistic,’ but she seems to believe in that sort of ideal. Writing here about Middlemarch and its hope that ‘the growing good of the world’ may depend on the diffusive effect of obscure acts of courage, heroism, and compassion, Fitzgerald says, not entirely confidently: ‘We must believe this, if we can.’ ‘Pity’ is one of the emotions—or qualities—she most values, especially in comedy. She certainly has a lively interest in little-read late-Victorian theological fiction, and a sharp eye for religious patches seeping through into secular-seeming texts, like Jane Austen’s Evangelicism leading Emma to weep over ‘a sin of thought,’ or Virginia Woolf inheriting from her father ‘a Victorian nonconformist conscience painfully detached from its God.’
But she is extremely reticent about her own beliefs. The people she admires are those who have a habit of ‘not making too much of things.’ She takes aesthetic pleasure in control and restraint: writing about Angus Wilson’s homosexuality, she says, with a rare touch of primness: ‘Getting rid of the restraints didn’t improve him as a writer—when does it ever?’ What autobiography we get here comes in glimpses—she says of her father that ‘everything that was of real importance to him he said as an aside.’ At one point in her life she started to write a biography of her friend L. P. Hartley, but stopped when she realized that it would give pain to his surviving relative. She thinks of him as resisting investigation; one of his characters, when unconcious, is subjected to ‘a complete examination’ by a famous specialist, ‘which in all his waking moments he had so passionately withstood.’ One of the very few personal details she gives us in these essays—that she once had a miscarriage—is offered only to illustrate the profound reserve of Ernest Shepard, who came to see her and handed her a bunch of flowers ‘without a word.’ She has a lot of time for silence: the silence that falls after a life-story like Coleridge’s, the world of Jewett’s stories ‘where silence is understood,’ the reserve which kept James Barrie from telling us what Mrs Oliphant said on her death-bed. This collection ends with Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published description, in her last novel, of a woman writer—a comic failure, of the kind Fitzgerald enjoyed writing about, too—leaving her audience behind (‘she took her voyage away from the shore’) and taking with her some mysterious unspoken words.
I am grateful for the assiduity, grace under pressure, support of and devotion to Penelope’s writing, and her memory, of my collaborators and friends: Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff.
An introduction to Emma
Emma (1814—15) is the last novel Jane Austen wrote before, at the age of forty, she began to feel the warning symptoms of her last illness. If a writer’s career can ever be said to have a high summer, this was hers.
Emma Woodhouse, we are told, is handsome, clever, and rich, and has lived nearly twenty-one years in this world ‘with very little to disturb or vex her.’ Feeling the muted irony of this, we know that quite soon something will happen to distress her. It will be due partly to her own temperament—‘a disposition to think a little too well of herself’—partly to her upbringing in quiet Highbury.
As in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, visitors arrive to unsettle the neighbourhood, but, unlike Elizabeth Bennet or Fanny Price, Emma meets them from a position of undisputed authority. Her reckless desire to manage and control is felt as the result of confining a keenly energetic character within a small space. She is, as Jane Austen is careful to show, very well-adapted to her life. She is the capable manager of a not very easy household and estate (which seems to include a piggery). She is generous and realistic towards the poor, a patient visitor to the cottagers, not expecting gratitude. But this strong-minded, affectionate young woman happens also to be an ‘imaginist,’ ‘on fire with speculation and fancy.’ One might feel, in fact, that she has the potentialities of a best-selling novelist.
To Jane Austen, however, the contemporary of Byron, ‘that very dear part of Emma, her fancy,’ represents a danger of a specific kind. It is shown as the enemy not of reason, but of truth. It tempts Emma to see the blooming, commonplace Harriet as the heroine of a romance, and leads her on through absurd schemes—when she pretends, for instance, to lose the lace of her ‘half-boot’ so that Harriet and Mr Elton can walk on together—to the moment when, overcome with disappointments and disillusions, she cries out, ‘O God! that I had never seen her!’
Jane Austen’s novels are constructed on a delicate system of losses and gains, or retreats and advances. She undertakes, I think, to show that Emma’s release of her creative imagination—in spite of her intervals of remorse and repentance—gradually becomes more and more dangerous, not only to others, but to her own nature. Undoubtedly she was worried about this new heroine ‘whom nobody but myself will much like.’ To Mr Clarke, the librarian of Canton House, with whom she was corresponding over the question of dedicating Emma to the Prince Regent, she wrote: ‘I am strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred “Pride and Prejudice” it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred “Mansfield Park” inferior in good sense.’ ‘Haunted’ is a strong word, and she does not sound as though she is making a conventional disclaimer. Rather it is as if she knew she was taking a risk, the risk, that is, of letting Emma go too far. The great Harriet undertaking is, after all, intended for the benefit of Harriet. It has ‘the real good will of a mind delighted with its own ideas.’ Robert Martin, Harriet’s suitor, must be got rid of and ‘Mr Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head.’ The very strength of ‘fixed’ and ‘driving’ seem to echo her determination to make the unreal real. But the fact remains that her object was to ‘better’ her unassuming friend and her regret—while it lasts—is very real, ‘with every resolution confirmed of repressing imagination all the rest of her life.’ By the time the second movement of the novel begins, her imagination—unrepressed—has taken a turn for the worse. She is paying a call on the talkative, poor-genteel Miss Bates. M iss Bates is expecting a long visit from her niece, Jane Fairfax, who is leaving her post as governess to the daughter of old friends. This daughter was recently married to a Mr Dixon. ‘At this moment, an ingenious and animating suspicion enter[ed] Emma’s brain with regard to Jane Fairfax [and] this charming Mr Dixon.’ It is the word ‘animating’ that betrays Emma here. The unkind, even heartless, and quite unfounded notion is like a breath of new life to her. How can she go so far as to share it, as an amusing confidence,