Happy Thanksgiving - let's talk about Jane Austen and bad family. You know the ones.

From pretentious Sir Walter to terrifying Sir Thomas, Jane Austen is full of terrible, treacherous family

Dear friends,

Happy Thanksgiving!

And for those of you joining us from outside the US or who don’t celebrate this family-filled or friends-filled feasting: Happy Thursday! 

As cynical as this title professes to be, I come to you today genuinely full of gratitude for family, for community, for health, and for each and every one of you who is engaging with this growing Austen Connection family of readers. 

Thank you for being here. And if you are enjoying these posts but not yet part of the Austen Connection family, join us by signing up - free - right here:

But also: Some of you may need some bolstering, some courage, when it comes to the holidays and the family gatherings. Many of us this holiday are dealing with loss. You might feel quietly lonely and downtrodden among boisterous family gatherings, a little like Anne Elliot does in Persuasion.

And even those of us fortunate enough to enjoy the company and camaraderie of sisters, siblings, parents and kids, not to mention cousins, aunts - you get the picture - still, like Jane Austen herself, even at the best of times there can be tricky situations, and also downright treacherous situations, to navigate.

And maybe one of the best things about Jane Austen’s stories is that she shows us how to gather our inner tools, our ammunition, our quiet courage, and keep our wits about us, to not only successfully navigate the difficulties, but perhaps even - like Fanny Price - to conquer. 

Hooray, it’s time for a Regency-era family gathering: Just beware of Sir Walter, Sir Thomas, Lucy Steele, Lady Catherine, and actually just about everyone in the house. Otherwise you should be good. Photo: Stuartan | Dreamstime.com

So, today’s letter is devoted to a catalog of bad family in Jane Austen - and it won’t be complete. Far from it. 

But you are helping us, friends. Stay tuned for our next post/letter, where you’ll find pictures from you, our Austen Connection community, featuring your favorite bad-family members from Austen. And - bonus - some pics of our favorite Austen-named pets. Because pets are often our best family members, are they not? We’ve been busy on Twitter, where you can find us at @AustenConnect, so thank you to all the Twitter friends who engaged with us. (And it’s not too late - if you want to tweet us at @AustenConnect, or email us your favorite bad-family members from Austen by replying here, we’ll include them in the next post!)

And for those of you here for the conversation on bad family, we’re going to start with the men. 

Let’s go ahead and smash the patriarchy

For me, the three worst characters in Austen are unfortunately of the male-identifying variety - don’t worry, guys, some of her best are also represented by male-identifying humans, as you well know - and they tend to work as brilliant stand-ins for the patriarchy. So today, let’s get right to smashing the patriarchy.

First, Sir Thomas. As we have mentioned in this Halloween post about “Mansfield Park, Horror Show,” Sir Thomas is on the outside a very benevolent dictator. But as we get deeper into the novel, we can see all kinds of ways this exemplar of British empire and fatherhood is not so exemplary. First, we see that his kids don’t like him much - the tone of the house becomes lighter when he leaves it. This is a bit like the way that other terrible family, Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot, zap the air out of the room in Bath. 

Then, we see that Sir Thomas unnecessarily orders everyone around. He orders Fanny to bed, for no reason, and even the narrator lists the possible reasons without landing on one - because it’s all so confounding. Then, most famously and abhorrently for contemporary readers, he sends his niece Fanny home to poverty in order for her to remember to value luxury and accept a marriage proposal from a dangerously flawed individual, Henry Crawford.

Sir Thomas is shown to be not only representative of all things English, aristocratic, and patriarchal, but is also shown to be shallow, domineering, and vapid - without true morals and without the capacity for true affection, unlike his niece Fanny.

He’s many things that we could unpack - but first of all, he’s a terrible family member.

But topping the Bad list might have to be Sir Walter. Unlike Sir Thomas, Sir Walter doesn’t even know how to pretend to be benevolent. He has only one focus: outward appearance. And unfortunately he applies this focus to considerations of class and status, which causes a lot of pain to his intelligent, soulful daughter Anne - our heroine, who is in love with that sailor guy. But Sir Walter also sparks a lot of comedy - he is almost too silly to despise for long. 

And the winner of the Absolute Worst list is …. drum roll, please: General Tilney. General Tilney is a favorite baddie from the canon for taking a young woman we’re secretly ridiculing for her wild imaginings about cruelty, evil and dangers, and actually making her nightmares come true by bestowing upon her actual cruelty, evil and dangers, thereby challenging our assumptions about the aristocracy, the patriarchy, young women, and how novels work - all in one. Thank you, General Tilney for your dutiful service to the great Jane Austen.

So where does this leave the women of Austen? Definitely not off the hook.

One of the things that can be confusing and confounding to readers of Jane Austen, and also scholars and critics, is her portrayal of women: So many of them are so very silly! Does Jane even like women?

General Tilney is a favorite baddie from the canon for taking a young woman we’re secretly ridiculing for her wild imaginings about cruelty, evil and dangers, and actually making her nightmares come true by bestowing upon her actual cruelty, evil and dangers, thereby challenging our assumptions about the aristocracy, the patriarchy, young women, and how novels work - all in one. Thank you, General Tilney for your dutiful service to the great Jane Austen.

The silly women are realistic - all too much so - and in Austen they always provide a window on to the Regency world Austen was in. Sometimes that world was benignly banal, and sometimes that world was brutal. Austen portrays both of these hazards through her silly women.

Austen’s silly women - an incomplete catalog

For those of us who love and adore categorizing, let’s break it down into the benignity and the brutality of the silly women. And so that we aren’t here all day - we all presumably have turkey dinners to cook or eat - let’s go with just a few favorites.

First, there’s the most obvious favorite Silly Woman, who would have to be Mrs. Bennet. She’s used in the novel Pride and Prejudice as a counterpoint to Eliza’s and Jane’s caution and discernment, and as a spark to Mr. Darcy’s pride and prejudice. 

The Bennet sisters are also, according to Mr. Bennet, the silliest girls in England. Lydia’s silliness becomes destructive - to herself and potentially to her family. 

This isn’t Jane Austen looking for an excuse to moralize. This is reflecting the reality of a girl’s life in a Regency world - you give into false gallantry and fashion at your own peril. 

As Austen shows repeatedly (and we’ll repeatedly discuss!), the frippery and frivolity of Regency-era notions about gallantry and Romance were false and unfulfilling for men, and downright dangerous for women. 

Still, Mrs. Bennet, while silly to a near-dangerous extent, ultimately cares about her family, and once Austen signs us on to Mrs. Bennet’s silliness, Austen then turns around and contrasts her favorably with Pride and Prejudice’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh - who is not only silly, ultimately, but is treacherous. 

And, does anyone else out there secretly sort of adore Mrs. Bennet for holding out against Mr. Darcy and his money? I always love that - as mercenary as Mrs. Bennet can be - she can’t make herself love Darcy or his money. And this is one of the fascinating ways that Austen is turning the tables in this novel and showing us that as bad as Lizzy Bennet’s family might be, they’re not as bad as Darcy’s family. We’ll all take Mrs. Bennet over Lady Catherine any day.

So we’ll put Mrs. Bennet in the silly-but-benign category. Lady Catherine goes in the Treachery bin. 

Mrs. Elton, from Emma, may be one of our best-known brutally-silly women of Austen. She’s truly silly - in a way that Austen’s silly women are often silly - reaching for the fashionable heights while managing to look ridiculous (as we always do when we’re reaching for the fashionable heights, unfortunately). 

But Mrs. Elton also, famously, does true harm - most conspicuously to our beloved Harriet Smith, when she helps her husband snub her at the dance (prompting our favorite true-elegance exhibit from Mr. Knightley, who rescues her - so thank you, Mrs. Elton); and she’s also less conspicuously but even more brutal with Jane Fairfax, constantly pretending to “help” her with governess recommendations, while in fact piling on Jane more public humiliation. 

Mrs. Elton is conspicuously silly but also brutal - one of Jane Austen’s best bad family. | Photo courtesy of Focus Features, seen here in the 2020 film ‘Emma’

That’s a lot of uncomfortable silliness going on in Pride and Prejudice, in Emma, and throughout Austen, but what you get in Sense and Sensibility, is not just a smattering of silly women here and there - but entire room-fulls of them, almost too much to keep up with.

These are not just Mean Girls - they are radically silly, exhibiting exactly the fatuity that society has shaped them into, and emerging with manners that are both banal and brutal. And the brutally silly women bring us entire drawing-room-fulls of oppressiveness.

Let’s take them in order of appearance: Mrs. Fanny Dashwood kicks us off. 

This might be my very favorite Austen bad family member. As John Dashwood’s wife and the wonderful Elinor and Marianne’s sister-in-law, she manages to subtly steer her weak and selfish husband into being even more weak and selfish than he would have been, by talking him out of the basic amount of inheritance owed to his sisters and Mrs. Dashwood, even though this “help” had been a death-bed promise to his father. This would seem to refute the philosophy of the 18th century statesman Edmund Burke, who wrote that this “power of perpetuating our property in our families … makes our weakness subservient to our virtue” (all quotes are from Sense and Sensibility, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Claudia Johnson). This “virtuous” English tradition leaves Elinor, Marianne, and Mrs. Dashwood effectively without a home and kicks off the events of the story. And, as biographer Claire Tomlin points out in this conversation with the Austen Connection, Fanny manages this all through mere clever talk with her husband. Fanny Dashwood: into the Treachery bin. 

These are not just Mean Girls - they are radically silly, exhibiting exactly the fatuity that society has shaped them into, and emerging with manners that are both banal and brutal.

Anyone hosting house guests this holiday? Jane shows you how not to do it: We have Lady Middleton, who completely lacks the inner resources Jane consistently celebrates, and is laser focused on her unruly children. And we have Mrs. Palmer, who is pretty, good-natured, and disastrously inattentive - and reading about her inattentiveness will make anyone who’s ever been spacey with house guests cringe. When a destitute and then dangerously ill Marianne falls ill in her home, all of the practical care and decisions are left to Elinor to arrange, with the help of Colonel Brandon. 

Mrs. Palmer is nothing more than what she’s supposed to be in Regency England - perky, pretty and ornamental. But because Mrs. Palmer is completely lacking in the inner resourcefulness that Austen holds up, she’s a well-dressed disaster: “Her “eye was caught by every thing pretty, expensive, or new” writes Austen, and she “dawdled away her time in rapture and indecision”  (Sense and Sensibility, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Claudia Johnson). 

Wow - from now on I’ll try very hard to not dawdle with rapture and indecision, but I’m not sure I’ll always achieve this. Sorry, Jane.

It’s through the hilarious but cringy surliness of Mr. Palmer that Austen shows us that the chaos and disappointment that this kind of Regency-built woman creates in her family, is also bad for men, for women, for the family, and for everyone.

Austen can say this better than anyone, and she says it in this wonderful sentence, of Mr. Palmer: “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman.”

Indeed.

Lucy Steele’s side-eye 

The women in Sense and Sensibility are doing their best to illustrate the key tension in Austen’s work, between artfulness and fakery and artlessness and true honesty.

Enter Lucy Steele, who may be the creepiest character in all of Jane Austen. It’s amazing to me that Austen created this character in her very first major published novel, as she is truly frightening.

Lucy is pretty, subtle, full of all kinds of arts, and she’s positioned to do much harm, being secretly engaged to the lovely, bumbling Edward Ferrars, the subject of our dear, prudent Elinor’s closely-guarded affections. 

In scene after scene, Lucy Steele uses her metallic will and her artfulness to subtly dig the knife into Elinor’s feelings, pulling her aside in drawing rooms to recount her histories and her interactions with Edward, always slyly looking out of her side eye, while Marianne plays heavy romantic preludes on the piano, oblivious. 

And yet, and yet: 

Austen is herself brutal about Lucy Steele - in a way that is unusual. One thinks perhaps Austen got it out of her system in this first major novel with Lucy, and then pulled herself together and mustered greater empathy by the time she got to her subsequent novels. 

Austen is mean about Lucy mainly because Lucy Steele is mean. But there’s more to it: Lucy is described as clever, but also uneducated - and this is where Austen is brutal. Lucy’s speech might be one of the rare or only places in Austen that you get the portrayal of an “unrefined” regional accent. (Are there others, friends and scholars? If so, please comment.) And it’s not, as a Dickens character might be, cozy or endearing. Lucy’s inelegant syntax and unsophisticated and ungrammatical word usage is used as a reflection almost of her malfeasance. Austen’s disdain seeps off the page. 

And as always with Austen, who possibly herself had a regional accent, it’s also funny: Lucy speaking inelegantly about “beaux,” or gentlemen, tells us: “For my part, I think they are vastly agreeable, provided they dress smart and behave civil. But I can’t bear to see them dirty and nasty.” (Claudia Johnson’s Norton critical edition) 

She can’t bear to see them dirty and nasty! Lucy is saying this to Elinor, revealing a few things at once: First, that Lucy is pretentious and affected and attempting to be impressive. Secondly that she is ignorant of the more refined life she is trying to reflect - For Elinor, being in the company of “beaux” that are uncivil and “nasty” is unthinkable; that Elinor has never been in the presence of anything other than refined gentleman simply goes without saying. 

In this way Lucy, attempting to rise to the occasion, is actually being somewhat scandalous - it’s hilarious, and subtly devastating.

Austen is herself brutal about Lucy Steele - in a way that is unusual. One thinks perhaps Austen got it out of her system in this first major novel with Lucy, and then pulled herself together and mustered greater empathy by the time she got to her subsequent novels. 

Austen, not surprisingly, is asking the question that Elinor is asking about Lucy and Edward: Elinor contemplates, could Edward “with his integrity, his delicacy, and well-informed mind, be satisfied with a wife like her - illiterate, artful and selfish?” 

This is as brutal - and true - as Austen gets. 

What’s going on with Marianne?

But as inelegant and unrefined as Lucy’s comments are, they are not artless.

And for Austen, artlessness - authenticity - is key. Austen almost gets derailed with the portrayal of Lucy and Elinor, perhaps weighing these characters with just too much import for them to carry. 

But then where does this leave Austen’s most radical, artless sister, Marianne?

By contrast to Lucy and Elinor, Marianne’s on the other end of the swimming hole - the deep end, that is.  Marianne is passionate, cerebral, truly artless, and sometimes downright awkward. Not to mention rude. 

Talk about bad family - In scene after scene, Marianne is not able to eat, not able to talk, barely able to get dressed or go out, and is inattentive - very much in contrast to her sister - toward others. She’s, basically, inconsiderate. (Anyone dealing with moody middle schoolers this holiday? Do them a favor, and think of Marianne!)

Even when she jumps at the chance to accompany the kind (but silly) Mrs. Jennings to London, she sits silent for the entire journey, leaving Elinor to make all of the conversation with their tiresome host. 

Ever been on a long road trip? Awkward.

Marianne also exhibits real mental health challenges that readers today are attuned to notice - she is very much in her head, full of anxiety, soars to vast emotional highs and then drops to dangerous lows.

And all of this is her “sensibility” - feelings and passions that are captivating and Romantic but also dangerous - though as the scholar Devoney Looser points out in her wonderful Great Courses lectures, it’s always more complicated than the simple dichotomy of the title.

For Austen, Marianne also exhibits “sense” by exhibiting candor and authenticity of feeling and insisting on it in her relations with others. (For me, this makes Marianne both bad family and good family: We love Marianne, and so does Austen - because she’s wildly true to herself and to others, even when her self-absorbing struggles make her check out. I feel Austen is patient with Marianne, and we should be too!)

So: How to be great family, according to Jane Austen

And once again - this artfulness vs. artlessness, is in some way, what all of Austen’s novels are about - the tension between the fashion and artfulness of society vs. true authentic feeling, affection, and loyalty. 

The former is unappealing, unloving and downright dangerous; while the latter is the foundation for both a happy life and a stronger society. 

And, of course, a great family! 

So, how do you be a good family member?!

Right from Jane Austen - it’s all about true affections, generosity-even-when-it’s-hard, kindness, and loyalty. Whether in a drawing room, a hospital room, on a long road trip, or at the dinner table. 

What do you think, friends?

Have you yourself felt molded unhelpfully to society’s, or your family’s, version of you, and in what ways have you broken the mold? 

What are your thoughts on the silly women of Austen, and what was she trying to tell us from her Regency world that can still speak to us today?

Let me know - you can comment right here!

You can also tweet us at @AustenConnect, email us by replying here, or find us on Insta and Facebook at @austenconnection.

If you want to think more about bad family and Jane Austen, check out this other post we did, which is a lot of treacherous bad-family fun: “For Jane Austen, Hell is Other People.” If you’ve ever felt alone with your quiet sagacity, tune in. 

And meanwhile have a wonderful day, whether it’s a Thanksgiving deal or just a weekend, I hope it’s filled with as much passion, fashion and silliness as you want it to be.

Yours ever so truly,

Plain Jane 

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