Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover

226 Pages·2003·0.85 MB·English

by  Patricia Menon (auth.)

Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover
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Austen, Eliot, Charlotte
Brontë and the
Mentor-Lover
Patricia Menon
©Patricia Menon 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-1-4039-0259-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2003 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-349-50818-1 ISBN 978-0-230-51204-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230512047
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Menon, Patricia.
Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and the mentor-lover / Patricia Menon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. English fiction–Women authors–History and criticism. 2. Mentoring in
literature. 3. Women and literature–England–History–19thcentury.
4. English fiction–19thCentury–History and criticism. 5. Brontè, Charlotte,
1816-1855–Characters–Mentors. 6. Eliot, George,
1819-1880–Characters–Mentors. 7. Austen, Jane,
1775-1817–Characters–Mentors. 8. Love stories, English–History and
criticism. 9. Man-woman relationships in literature. 10. Mentoring of
authors–England. I. Title.
PR868.M47M46 2003
823’ .8099287–dc21 2003040474
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
In memory of my father,
Leonard William Mitchell
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Prologue: The Mentor-Lover in the Eighteenth Century – Novel,
Conduct Book and Archetype 1
1 “Saturated with the Platonic Idea”? Judgment and Passion in
Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudiceand Emma 15
2 Sense and Sensibilityand Mansfield Park:
“At Once Both Tragedy and Comedy” 47
3 “Slave of a Fixed and Dominant Idea”:
Charlotte Brontë’s Early Writings – Preliminaries or Precursors? 80
4 “Should We Try to Counteract This Influence?”
Jane Eyre, Shirleyand Villette 98
5 George Eliot and “The Clerical Sex”:
From Scenes of Clerical Lifeto Middlemarch 129
6 “Worth Nine-Tenths of the Sermons”?
The Author as Mentor-Lover in Daniel Deronda 163
Epilogue: The Author, the Reader and the “imaged solution” 188
Notes 193
Bibliography 196
Index 209
vii
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of part of Chapter 2 was first published as follows: Patricia
Menon, “The Mentor-Lover in Mansfield Park: At Once Both Tragedy and
Comedy”, The Cambridge Quarterly, 29:2, 2000 (146–64). The material appears
here by permission of Oxford University Press.
For exemplifying (in the words of George Whalley) the “integrity of percep-
tion, judgment and recognition” to which the literary critic aspires, and for his
continued help and encouragement, I am indebted to Brian Crick.
Anyone working on a project of this nature owes gratitude to many people for
sharing, in unique permutations, their advice, criticism, encouragement and
friendship. My thanks go to Cornelia Cook, Jennie Crick, Marion Evans, Patrick
Fang, Holly Forsythe, Isobel Grundy, Graham Handley, Paul Hutchinson, Duke
Maskell, Catherine Mitchell, John Muggeridge, Leonée Ormond, Brenda
Sauchuk and Michael Sauchuk.
Some obligations are very old indeed and I should like to record my gratitude
to Dorothy Leader, Frances Mercer, Helen Shackleton and Audrey Cleobury
Sunderland.
I wish to thank Niagara College for granting me sabbatical leave and to
acknowledge the help of Barry Sharpe, who, as Chairman and Dean, offered both
encouragement and practical assistance. I also wish to express my appreciation
to members of the English departments at Niagara College and Brock University,
and to the library staff of both institutions, especially those who patiently dealt
with my many requests for inter-library and extended loans.
I am grateful to those from whom I have received advice and assistance at
Palgrave Macmillan, including Eleanor Birne, Charmian Hearne, Julian Honer,
Paula Kennedy, Rebecca Mashayekh, Emily Rosser, John M. Smith and the manu-
script readers.
In a wider sphere, my gratitude is due to the community of critics and schol-
ars, past and present, whose work I have read with benefit and pleasure. In this
connection, I wish to thank the contributors to “Victoria: the electronic forum
for Victorian Studies” (http://www.indiana.edu/~victoria/discussion.html#vic)
for the generosity with which they share their knowledge.
Finally, for the encouragement and support they have given me, I am grateful
to my husband Govind Menon and my mother Jessie Mitchell.
PATMENON
Fonthill
viii
Prologue: The Mentor-Lover in the
Eighteenth Century – Novel,
Conduct Book and Archetype
Because the figure of the mentor-lover raises difficult but inescapable
questions about the nature of sexual love and its links to the attributes
of the mentor – power, judgment and moral authority – it provides a
means to investigate, from a particularly revealing perspective, the work
of those authors who employ it.
Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, writers whose strug-
gles with these questions remain as compelling today as when they
wrote, all used the figure extensively, though to varied ends. The reader,
attending to the same figure, may follow their explorations of a wide
range of interconnected issues stemming from the relationship of love
to morality, power and judgment. Among the subjects brought into
focus in this way are sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct, and
the nature of male and female roles. To trace the uses they made of the
mentor-lover is to follow the developing interests of these three very
different women as their work matured, and to identify what distin-
guishes each from the others. The characteristics they attribute to the
figure also provide an opportunity to explore the intriguing correlations
between their conceptions of the mentor-lover and their own relation-
ship with their readers, each eliciting a different form of love and elect-
ing a different style of instruction.
In the century before Austen, a widespread interest in education
directed to living well through attention to conduct and moral prin-
ciples is apparent from the popularity of conduct books and philosoph-
ical works. The close connections between these forms of instruction
and the treatment of love within the novel are suggested by the devel-
opment of Richardson’s Pamela from a work initially planned to
1