P&P was really originally epistolary (!) & the curious pattern of Tuesdays

Elizabeth to Charlotte: “their correspondence was as regular and frequent as it had ever been (1979 BBC P&P scripted by Fay Weldon, II:3, Ch 26)

Dear friends and readers,

I know the idea has been around for a long time and a number of people have argued in learned journals (sometimes for several paragraphs, complete with a rough outline of a calendar) that First Impressions was epistolary. I have written a paper trying to demonstrate that as Elinor and Marianne, S&S was first written as epistolary narrative, but not until early this week did I truly believe firmly this is so, and especially demonstrable from the present P&P.

Mrs Bennet reads Miss Bingley’s letter to Jane inviting her to Netherfield (1979 P&P, I:7)

People have attempted to work out who wrote who and from where, from statements in P&P, e.g., between Mrs Gardiner and her two nieces. Mrs Gardiner and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Jane, Charlotte and Elizabeth (first when she is Miss Lucas and then as Charlotte Collins), and suggested maybe Elizabeth went on the originally planned longer tour, when FI was much longer, how it was set into a 1796-97 calendar, altered in 1799, set into an 1802 calendar, lifted off the grid and re-set to 1811-12, by looking at the calendar’s inconsistencies and gaps.

What no one has done is to trace the calendar in full detail, look at the chapters as redactions of longer correspondences where a narrative summary has replaced what was epistolary, and sample letters and quotations of letters brought in. I believe I’ve found a vestigial epistolary feature in the present text too. I also uncover the patterns of alterations and contractions in the present P&P. What follows comes from my newly exacting calendar for P&P.

Why do it? because the persistent, frequent and closely repeated precise indications of intervals of time, days of the week, a few dates (month and numbered day) as well as distances reveals the nature of Austen’s art, what was in her conscious mind as she wrote — as well as another curious pattern of important Tuesdays, all of which Austen tells us are a Tuesday. I cited three for S&S in my last blog.

I’m not finished with the novel yet but, using an 1811-12 calendar as of the time of Lydia’s elopement I’ve found 5:

1) Tuesday, 15th October, from Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent Mr Collins writes his letter, (I:13:);

Jane ill, Elizabeth rightly concerned (1995 BBC/WBGH P&P, scripted by Andrew Davies, I:7-8)

2) Tuesday, Nov 12th: “The next morning” Mrs Bennet’s “felicity of contrivance” lands Jane ill in bed, and we have the very long day whose phases of time Austen carefully plots from Elizabeth’s reception of Jane’s evening before note, three miles, long day by Jane’s bedside alternating with time in the Netherfield drawing-room (Mrs Bennet’s refusal to let them come back until the following “Tuesday” so that they will have been there a a full week as of this second Tuesday confirms this);

3) Tuesday, Nov 19th: “The next day” after Mr Collins’s arrival on Monday, Nov 18th, Lydia’s plan enacted: the girls take Mr Collins with them to Meryton and Elizabeth sees the estranged encounter of Darcy and Wickham.

“You have delighted us long enough, Mr Bennet to Mary (95 P&P, the Netherfield Ball, I:18)

4) Tuesday, Nov 26th: the famous Netherfield ball where Elizabeth dances with Darcy, is mortified by her family while he is alerted to Bingley’s intense attraction to Jane and Mrs Bennet’s determination to marry Jane to Bingley;

Mr Bennet realizing Sat/Sun, leaves Tuesday (Jane’s further letter) (95 P&P)

Elizabeth realizing as she reads both letters at Lambton inn (95 P&P)

5) Tuesday, August 4th: the day of Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley, Mr Bennet’s trip to town to try to find and rescue Lydia from infamy and the second part of Jane’s letter informing Elizabeth of all this (“”Yes he went on Tuesday as I wrote you word”)

Elizabeth’s shocked surprise (III:1)

Darcy startled (III:1)

I have excluded conjectured Tuesdays (where on can work out a Tuesday but it is not named by Austen) and Tuesdays that are named but do not as yet seem to me made emphatic (as the “Tuesday” in Sept 1812 when Darcy and Bingley dine at Longbourn). I may have to change my mind when I see all the novels this way. (I’m not as quick as Sherlock Holmes.)

*************************

Darcy writes his long letter (95 P&P, II:12, Ch 35)

Vestigial and full-blown epistolary features (based on Janet Altman’s study):

1) Oddities often reveal that we have failed to explain something. So, first, an oddity. Mr Collins’s letter is dated 15 October but first put into a much later chapter where the date is (we are told in the letter itself) Monday Nov 18th. Mr Bennet reads it aloud for the first time on the day Collins is due to come. This is odd; he would have gotten it a month earlier and written a fortnight before (as he says) and never mentioned it to anyone? And tell just before Mr Collins arrives? He might have in order to avoid the fuss Mrs Bennet will make, but the pace of the chapter is different from those that have gone before, sudden and abrupt. Instead of slowly from moment to moment we suddenly jump back and forth. She does it real smooth. It’s almost not noticeable. But it is since she leaves those dates in.

I surmise the letter itself originally appeared in the novel in the place it’s dated and thus the reader read it — without having to ask ourselves who else read it.

2) If you trace the calendar carefully as I’m doing now, you notice the characters discuss 5 meetings between Jane and Bingley which they refer back to, discuss and were cut. These, together with William Lucas’s assembly ball are in one of the periods of indeterminate time. Darcy later on refers to dancing only four times at a ball where he knew no one, but the ball where he knew no one he refused to dance. At Sir Lucas’s assembly there is not one mention of Jane and Bingley; indeed at no point in the novel do they ever talk to one another.

I suggest Jane Austen revised the first quarter of her novel to make the attention of the first curve is wholly on Darcy and Elizabeth and that romance and cut all else away ruthlessly away (including Jane and Bingley’s encounters). Collins’s letter is held off so we will not be distracted. Also that the thematic emphasis would have come out more directly: first impressions. Bingley is manipulated to receive the wrong impression about Jane’s love for him; perhaps we saw situations where he could have easily been mislead.

Obviously Elizabeth gets the wrong first impression of Wickham and Darcy but as Wickham’s letter now stands there is more to be explained. In the present novel Elizabeth just dismisses the charges of Darcy’s jealousy and we are asked to forget how really nasty and exclusive his early behavior is. It seems that in the present novel we are to say that when he meets someone who makes the hierarchy irrelevant, Darcy makes an exception for her (or is an Aspergers type) rather than she was really mistaken. His behavior in the early part of the novel also resembles that of Lord Osborne in the unfinished fragment The Watsons, and Catherine Hubbard accounts for Osborne by presenting him as really shy and awkward, but in P&P once Darcy changes tactics he’s not shy at all.

3) A central feature of the epistolary novel is the letter as actor, the letter as what initiates an action or phase. We know of one: Darcy’s long one. Another is the reader reading the letter: usually in the form of another letter to a friend. We have that: Elizabeth’s reading Darcy’s letter.

In his commentary to the 2005 P&P Joe Wright said he disliked letters in a movie (so uncinematic and dull he opined) but could not avoid them: Elizabeth reading Darcy’s letter

At the close of the present Volume I we have a sudden turn to vagueness (no longer moving tick-tock, tick-tock except now and again within the vagueness and dialogues surrounding Miss Bingley’s letter. That letter is an initiator.

(We have some further long letters, Mr and Mrs Gardiner’s in Volume 3 as a way of telling Lydia’s story, with Elizabeth and Jane’s readerly responses).

4) There seems to be a correlation between when time in the novel turns indeterminate and much was “contracted” (to use Cassandra’s term) or “altered:” we are a few chapters in the book which are made of quotations from letters (or a correspondence), descriptions of letters, an interconnecting narrative, with a powerful climactic letter as if Austen were taking a bunch of letters and condensing them by linking narrative and summary into brief transitions.

For example, II:3, Ch 26: Here we have two correspondences cut down: Jane’s and Elizabeth’s; Elizabeth’s and Mrs Gardiner. As Jane was experiencing her anguish in London and writing to Elizabeth about it and Elizabeth reading; so Elizabeth was experiencing her more controlled and distanced pain as Wickham dropped her in favor of the suddenly richly endowed Miss King in Hertfordshire. In both cases we end on a poignant letter, in Jane’s case frankly presenting her pain, in Elizabeth’s rationalizing it away. These are the remnants of two correspondences which ran parallel in FI.

Elizabeth reading Jane’s letters (95 P&P — Davies intertwines Jane and Elizabeth’s voice-overs

Jane’s vigil told in letters is visualized (95 P&P)

A lot in the present P&P is closely similar in thought patterns to the present S&S. No surprise as these two extant texts were written either in tandem or alternatively 1809-181.3 The way in which Jane stubbornly holds onto her faith in Miss Bingley in the face of all signs of cold betrayal anticipates or rehearses or simply is parallel to the way Marianne maintained her faith in Willoughby; the way Jane thinks about it is similar to Mrs Dashwood’s: “considering what her behaviour was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion” (II:3, Ch 26). The way Elizabeth justifies Wickham while “less clear-sighted” (the narrator’s phrase) about Charlotte’s need anticipates or rehearses how Elinor justifies and forgives Edward but not Willoughby. Love is blind.

There’s a closely similar mixture of unmoored conversations (some of biting satire between Mr and Mrs Bennet), remnants of dramatic narrative, connective tissue and the climactic redacted letter in I:24 and II:1, Ch 25: Austen cut a much longer accounting of the arrival of Miss Bingley’s letter, the devastation of Jane, the pain inflicted on her by her mother and her father’s sardonic ironies.

5) During Elizabeth’s visit to Hunsford one can see very clearly (because the section is long) that we go back and forth between indeterminate and/or approximated time to precisely clocked or phased time. During those parts of the novel which are precise we have the famous long scenes at Rosings, Elizabeth’s walk with Fitzwilliam, and Darcy’s proposal These are very like the long letters Samuel Richardson uses to convey his novels. When the clock slows down to tick-tock, tick tock with every hour and phase of a day accounted for, we are similarly in the famous scenes say of assemblies and balls at Herfordshire, or the time at Pemberley.

By contrast, Lady Susan is written to a template of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, where the length of the letters is kept credible. If then LS is a mid-career book (as I believe it to be), Austen had indeed moved away from earlier epistolary modes by her mid-career, but when she revised her books for publication the best writing was still that which the epistolary narrative genre had encouraged or allowed.

Epistolary narrative does allow a novelist to personate a character directly without having to analyse in a more distanced way as 3rd person omniscience demands and it allows for continual reflection and ironies through juxtaposition.

Helen Fielding’s highly successful free adaptation made strong use of voice-over (2001 Bridget Jones’s Diary)

Well those are my findings thus far and I’ve not finished P&P for an umpteenth reading. What I’ve not broached is how Austen’s obsessive keeping of time and her choice of epistolary narrative in the first place relates to her sense of selfhood in the novels and in her life, her psychic adjustments as an artist and woman and the 18th century developing sense of time through the growing use of clocks, calenders and subjective art forms.

Ellen
.