Austen and “the sweets of so protracted an autumn”

‘Have you been lately in Sussex?’ said Elinor.
I was at Norland about a month ago.’
‘And how does dear, dear Norland look?’ cried Marianne.
‘Dear, dear Norland,’ said Elinor, ‘probably looks much as it always does at this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.’
‘Oh,’ cried Marianne, ‘with what transporting sensation have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.’
‘It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves (Chapter 16).’

Thomas Gainsborough (1728-88), “Autumn or Sussex Landscape”

Dear friends and readers,

Prompted by Diana Birchall’s “The Sweets of Autumn,”, Ron Dunning’s comment, and photos, especially from the ball, from the JASNA AGM (at Minneapolis), usually occurring in mid-autumn, I thought I’d remind everyone that even if Austen does not use the word “autumn” often, my calendars or timelines show that the action proper in four of Austen’s novels begins in autumn; ends in four of them, and the few long textual reveries upon the seasons are devoted to autumn.

S&S, P&P, Emma, The Watsons

The Dashwoods move to Barton cottage in “very early September” (1797) and Edward and Elinor marry “early in the autumn” (1798). P&P opens “before Michaelmas” (1810) when Mr Bingley rents Netherfield Park. By my calculation the double wedding of Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley occur a year later, mid-October (1811). Reckoning by Harriet’s stories of her late summer time with the Martins, and Austen’s phrase “all the autumn” we know Mr Western married Miss Taylor sometime between late September and early October (1813). “Before the end of [the following] September Emma attends Harriet to church to marry Mr Martin; while Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are “waiting for November” to marry, so Emma and Mr Knightley fix on “the intermediate month,” October (1814). The Watsons begins on October 13th, a Tuesday (1801), and a ball. We are told Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland married “within a twelvemonth from the first day of their meeting:” as I reckon that meeting February, I take it “late autumn, 1798 or early winter, 1799.”

Mansfield Park and Persuasion

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1839-93), “Chill Autumn”

Although these neither begin or end in autumn, there is some remarkable autumn poetry in the memories reverie “in the gloom and dirt of a November day” of Mary Crawford and Fanny sitting in Mrs Grant’s garden while Fanny marvels “at the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind:

“the weather being unusually mild for the time of year, and venturing sometimes even to sit down on one of the benches now comparatively unsheltered, remaining there perhaps till, in the midst of some tender ejaculation of Fanny’s on the sweets of so protracted an autumn, they were forced, by the sudden swell of a cold gust shaking down the last few yellow leaves about them, to jump up and walk for warmth
    This is pretty, very pretty,” said Fanny, looking around her as they were thus sitting together one day; “every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field … “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory … “I am so glad to see the evergreens thrive!” said Fanny, in reply. “My uncle’s gardener always says the soil here is better than his own, and so it appears from the growth of the laurels and evergreens in general. The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! … (Chapter 22)

But Miss Crawford is no more impressed by memory and the evergreen than Elinor was by dead leaves.

Then there’s the exquisitely melancholy country walk in “on a fine November day,” the trip to Lyme not long after,

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such-like musings and quotations …

but Anne Elliot is interrupted by Louisa and Wentworth’s pointed colloquy:

Anne could not immediately fall into a quotation again. The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth, and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory …

as do other autumnal reveries in this novel, including “panegyrics” on “glossy nuts” and such like (Chapter 10).

Susan LaMonte (1920-2012), “Seeds”

But Anne Elliot is as strong an “enthusiast” for nature in autumn as Captain Wentworth:

The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest-trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood (Chapter 11).

Moments across the oeuvre:

Marianne Dashwood’s happiest time with Willoughby is “a showery October” (Chapter 11); Emma Watson’s beautiful kindness to the mortified, snubbed little Charles at a ball is also October (no chapter divisions); the Mansfield Park players are “alive with acting” in October and November (Chapters 14-18); we are told a year ago, a year before Sanditon opens is Michaelmas (no chapters).

Only Lady Susan and Catherine; or the Bower, are among the post- wild juvenilia works without observance of autumn.

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Sonnet 32: To Melancholy

Written on the banks of the Arun, October 1785

When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil,
And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,
I love to listen to the hollow sighs,
Thro’ the half-leafless wood that breathes the gale:
For at such hours the shadowy phantom pale,
Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eye;
Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies,
As of night-wanderers, who their woes bewail!
Here, by his native stream, at such an hour,
Pity’s own Otway I methinks could meet,
And hear his deep sighs swell the sadden’d wind!
O Melancholy! — such thy magic power,
That to the soul these dreams are often sweet,
And soothe the pensive visionary mind!

— by Charlotte Smith whose sonnets are alluded to in Persuasion

Diana suggests autumn is a “suspect season” for Austen; I respond: no more than any other. She ever checks herself by the saturnine wit of her mind in the persons of her dryer characters and her ironic narrator. Rather, as Diana does show, the word most associated with Autumn in Austen’s vocabulary is “sweet:” “the sweets of so protracted an autumn,” even if chill and dark early. She recognizes its beauty’s connection with death but in a characteristically muted form. There are fleeting and a few longer appreciations of beauty in all phases of the seasons, but autumn she goes on about much longer, and makes it key moments in her character’s lives and her story arcs. What is also individual is that while her autumn days can be fine, they are cold, and not sunny, never balmy as in this classic picture of an “English Autumn Afternoon” (Ford Madox Brown (1821-93)

When that dreamer Mr Knightley sits by his fire, he quotes Cowper “Myself creating what I saw” from a dark cold twilight autumn evening:

………………….But me perhaps
The glowing hearth may satisfy a while
With faint illumination, that uplifts
The shadow to the ceiling, there by fits
Dancing uncouthly to the quivering flame.
Not undelightful is an hour to me
So spent in parlour twilight; such a gloom
Suits well the thoughtful or unthinking mind,
The mind contemplative, with some new theme
Pregnant, or indisposed alike to all …

Soothed with a waking dream of houses, towers,
Trees, churches, and strange visages expressed
In the red cinders, while with poring eye
I gazed, myself creating what I saw.
Nor less amused have I quiescent watched
The sooty films that play upon the bars
Pendulous, and foreboding in the view
Of superstition, prophesying still … (The Task)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875), Autumn Landscape

Ellen