An astonishing moment in Persuasion (1818) comes when the narrator transfers a pair of characters from one location to another by means of a sleight-of-hand technique more like something one might expect to find in a novel by Virginia Woolf or one of the other great modernist stream-of-consciousness writers than in a novel of the early nineteenth century. Anne Elliot and her older friend Lady Russell have been visiting Anne’s sister’s family at Uppercross, a chaotically loud house full of obnoxious Christ-mas cheer: “On one side was a table, occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel; the whole com-pleted by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others” (Austen 2004: 110). Additional visitors contribute further to the noise, “a domestic hurricane” that Anne “would have deemed . . . a bad restorative of the nerves” (there has been a grave illness in the family), but the family matriarch Mrs. Musgrove observes with pleasure that “nothing was so likely to do her good as a little quiet cheerfulness at home” (110). Developing one of Persuasion’s signal themes, perspective and the difference distance makes, the scene concludes with a one-sentence paragraph articulating the speaker’s scathing judgment on all this noise: “ ‘I hope I shall remember, in future,’ said Lady Russell, as soon as they were reseated in the carriage, ‘not to call at Uppercross in the Christmas holidays.’ ” It’s the sub-sequent paragraph, though, that whisks the reader into a disconcertingly modern narrative mode:

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of Knowledge

Jenny Davidson

A Companion to British Literature: Volume III: Long Eighteenth-Century Literature 1660–1837, First Edition. Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Every body has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity. When Lady Russell, not long afterwards, was entering Bath on a wet afternoon, and driving through the long course of streets from the Old Bridge to Camden-place, amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milk-men, and the ceaseless clink of pattens, she made no complaint. No, these were noises which belonged to the winter pleasures; her spirits rose under their influence; and, like Mrs. Musgrove, she was feeling, though not saying, that, after being long in the country, nothing could be so good for her as a little quiet cheerfulness.

To borrow a term anachronistically from filmmaking, Austen has used a “dissolve” to negotiate this transition; we are first with Anne and Lady Russell in the carriage outside Uppercross, and then with the one-sentence aphorism “Every body has their taste in noises” – it sounds like something Samuel Johnson might have written in one of his periodical essays – we shift smoothly to another carriage scene occurring a short time afterwards and a significant number of miles away. The interior of the car-riage and the two women inside it remain the same, of course, and while the sounds outside are not the same in kind, it is the fact of external cacophony that provides continuity and lets Austen elliptically omit all of the intervening narration that might have been expected to be needed to get the characters from one place to another. It is a strikingly strange technique, once attended to closely; indeed, the entire sequence of Austen’s six major novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and the pair of novels published together in four volumes after Austen’s death, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (1818), supplemented by juvenilia unpublished in her lifetime, and the opening of a late story about a seaside resort called Sanditon that might have been developed into a full-length novel – shows Austen relentlessly experimenting. Notwithstanding the accessible and appealing nature of Austen’s story-telling, this chapter will highlight the strangeness of her fiction rather than its more familiar or consoling aspects, with a view to suggesting some of the ways in which Austen’s fiction both is and is not like the novels of her contemporaries.

In a well-known passage in Northanger Abbey, a satire on conventions of the Gothic that was probably composed by Austen in the late 1790s but wasn’t published until 1818, the narrator playfully reproaches novel-writers and novel-readers who denigrate their favorite genre. When a young lady, asked what she is reading, lays down the book and says that it is “ ‘only a novel,’ ” the narrator glosses that dismissal with this ironic amplification:

“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;” or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (Austen 2003: 24)

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The novels named here are by Frances Burney (Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, pub-lished in 1782, and Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, published in 1796) and Maria Edgeworth (Belinda. A Moral Tale appeared in 1801), and Austen shared with Burney and Edgeworth an interest in exploring the conditions under which a young woman might develop into a fully ethical human adult and in the process choose to become a member of a community whose values she would not embrace unthinkingly but which she would herself help to define and sustain. Burney and Edgeworth were both intensely concerned with female first-person points of view, but chose in these novels to tell the title character’s story from a third-person perspective whose potential to sum up and offer judgment upon choices and orientations of individual characters offered significant advantages over first-person narration in the epistolary mode, in which the story could be advanced exclusively by means of letters.

The tension between first- and third-person narration had structured the choices of novelists throughout the eighteenth century, but the choice of which mode to utilize took on a new charge in the wake of revolution in France, with first-person narration aligned with the radical subjectivities of Rousseau and his followers and third-person narration offering a potentially conservative containment of the more obviously trans-gressive first-person energies of self-love, self-pity, and other major forms of self-centeredness (see Davidson 2008: 233–250). Marilyn Butler’s influential 1975 book Jane Austen and the War of Ideas recontextualized Austen’s fiction in the polemical arguments and novelistic back-and-forth of the 1790s, illuminating aspects of Austen’s narrative choices by juxtaposing her fictions to radical novels by Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as to the moderate-to-conservative third-person novels of Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West, Amelia Alderson Opie, and Maria Edgeworth. This byplay between Jacobin and anti-Jacobin urges in the novels of the 1790s and early 1800s, further explored by Gary Kelly and a host of other scholars, has continued to figure in critical depictions of Austen as responding as crucially to Edmund Burke as to, say, Ann Radcliffe, just as increasingly the novels of Radcliffe herself (indeed, Gothic fiction more generally) have been seen as interest-ingly embedded in a complex political history (see Johnson 1998 and Tuite 2002).

The first two books Austen published, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), had both probably been drafted almost twenty years earlier as epis-tolary novels (see Southam 2001: 53–59), and while those notional epistolary drafts don’t survive, it seems that third-person narration offered Austen an effective way to circumvent the temptation, embraced by Samuel Richardson several generations earlier, of producing a fiction most notable for the extravagant fullness of its represen-tation of life. This is the “referential” quality Ian Watt foregrounds in his influential account of Defoe and Richardson in The Rise of the Novel (1956), where he describes each of those writer’s aim as being “to make the words bring his object home to us in all its concrete particularity, whatever the cost in repetition of parenthesis or verbosity” (Watt 1956: 30, 29). Watt here emphasizes the stylistic costs of an exhaustive refer-entiality, but there are also ethical costs to the novelist who backs an assumption – it is the enabling premise of Pamela (1740–1741), one that Richardson modified more

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tactfully for Clarissa (1747–1748) – that every particular of the protagonist’s life is worth reporting. Fielding, Watt shows, critiques both the stylistic and the ethical implications of such story-telling practices, presenting the reader instead “with a sifted and clarified report of the findings” that gains a certain authority by virtue of that selectivity, but only at considerable cost in terms of the feeling of authenticity: “because a patent selectiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of the report,” Watt explains, “or at least diverts our attention from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter” (30). It is Austen, Watt concludes, who represents the most successful offspring of the alternative traditions associated with Richardson and Fielding, com-bining immediacy with judgment in a vein that had also been mined by Burney.

In his ambitious book on the origins of the English novel, Michael McKeon pursues a line of thought loosely similar to Watt’s when he observes that Richardson’s model for the epistolary novel shifts between two different and seemingly incompatible modes of self-justification, historicity (it really happened) and subjectivity (it happened to me): “the exhaustiveness of the protagonist’s reflections,” McKeon writes of Pamela, “is justified not by the fact that she really made them, but because they are her very own” (McKeon 1987: 414). To “select” too obviously, as Fielding does, is to risk undermining the claims of historicity and of subjectivity: if facts have been chosen and consciously arranged, they no longer represent an unmediated historical record, with the kinds of authority such a mass of factual data can command, while if they are presented as being “objective” or judged outside the immediate experience of a single thinking person, it is precisely that mediation which undercuts the potential to reveal lived personal experience. The paradox of Austen’s style is that while it leaves us very much with the impression of selectivity, the reader retains a sense of historicity notwithstanding the high degree of mediation (the passage quoted in opening from Persuasion is a good case in point); again, the handling of the third-person voice, and in particular the technique of free indirect style, secures a kind of psychological realism and intensity that feels quite different from anything in Fielding. Claude Rawson writes of Austen’s free indirect style (he prefers the term “free indirect speech” because of the way it foregrounds the distinctive fashion in which the words of an individual character’s thoughts or speech migrate into the third-person voice) that “[i]t combines the ostensibly factual reporting of speech and thought with complex and shifting intimations of judgmental perspective,” observing that “[t]he trick is to report actual phrases used, but ‘indirectly,’ so that the narration combines the voice and moral perspective of the original speaker with those of one or more reporting or narrating agents” (Rawson 1994: 269; see also Ferguson 2000: 157–180). Rawson shows that despite Austen’s personal preference for the fiction of Samuel Richardson over Henry Fielding, the sharply stylized quality of her prose derives from a “style of selective knowingness, popularised in the early eighteenth century in the Tatler and Spectator, and sharpened by Fielding for novelistic use” (275).

It probably can be said of any major writer that their work invites and enables both formalist and historicist readings, but it is a particularly striking fact about the Austen criticism of recent years that it should so strongly embody these two loosely opposing

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critical tendencies. Perhaps the most explicitly political strain of recent Austen criti-cism emerged from and coalesced around Edward Said’s high-profile argument about slavery and Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism (1993), a critical discussion so influential that it prompted and guided Patricia Rozema’s polemical but appealingly imaginative film version of Mansfield Park (it is hard to think of another recent case in which a piece of literary criticism so thoroughly shaped a film adaptation of a “classic” work of literature). The work of Claudia L. Johnson and other feminist critics explores the political implications of Austen’s arguments about women and depend-ency, and another topic of considerable interest has been the gender configurations that accreted around Austen’s work in the century and a half of reception following her death, with particular interest directed to Rudyard Kipling’s strange and fascinat-ing story of 1924, “The Janeites,” about a secret society of World War One combatants who know that “there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place” (see Johnson 2011: 232–247 and Lynch 2000). One of the most widely read works of Austen criti-cism published in the last ten years, on the other hand, is D. A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (2003), a series of essays after the manner of Roland Barthes that pursues a strenuously close formal approach to the paradoxes and perversities of what Miller calls “Austen Style.”

Austen’s own political references are oblique and opaque to a teasing degree. When Emma’s Jane Fairfax alludes to the inquiry offices where she might find employment as a governess as “[o]ffices for the sale – not quite of human flesh – but of human intellect,” her would-be patroness Mrs. Elton defensively responds by saying that if Jane means “a fling at the slave-trade,” it must be asserted that her own brother-in-law “was always rather a friend to the abolition” (she imagines that Jane might have been making a dig at the political affiliations and beliefs of her merchant relatives), whereupon Jane disavows any claim to have produced satire or critique: “I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade . . . ; governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies” (Austen 2008: 235). And that’s it: the novel centrally considers questions about female dependency and class difference, but allusions to specific political debates or historical disputes are cloaked in an elliptical allusiveness that resists definitive unpacking. Similarly, though the titles of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindica-tion of the Rights of Woman (1792) are audibly alluded to at another point in Emma, the phrase is set into an ostentatiously apolitical context, a conversation concerning the suitability of the space the village inn might provide for a ball: “A private dance, without sitting down to supper, was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women” (199). The playfulness of these allusions gives a fundamental indeterminacy to questions about Austen’s politics, and the oblique quality of Austen’s manner of proceeding is in this sense as striking in the substantive or the political register as it is in the formal one.

In 1994, Daniel Pool published a book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist: The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century

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England. The choice of which author’s name to match with which verb struck me at the time as somewhat odd. It probably has something to do with gender, perhaps even with an underlying notion that decorous nineteenth-century ladies aren’t seen to consume food in public: food is surely consumed more copiously and frequently in Dickens’s novels than in Austen’s, with the possible exception of Emma, where gruel and wedding cake and strawberries do a good deal of work in terms of charac-terization. The matching of Austen’s name with eating rather than knowing also obscures the fact that knowledge – more precisely, conditions of knowledge – are probably more strikingly constitutive of Austen’s forms of narration than of any other single novelist in the English language excepting Henry James. This can be seen especially clearly – almost crudely – in Northanger Abbey. That novel is patterned loosely on Don Quixote as well as on a host of recent popular reimaginings of that story, often built around a central female figure (Charlotte Lennox’s popular novel The Female Quixote had been published in 1752); its protagonist Catherine’s imagina-tion, in thrall to the tropes of Gothic fiction, leads her to misinterpret one thing after another. Although the novel initially foregrounds comic disparities between Gothic expectations and everyday reality, things darken somewhat when General Tilney, father of Catherine’s love object and proprietor of the abbey of the title, having been laboring under a misconception that Catherine is an heiress and therefore rep-resents a suitable match for his son Henry, discovers that he has been misled. Near the novel’s conclusion, he casts Catherine out of the house, with consequences that are not just embarrassing and unpleasant but potentially actually dangerous for her. Henry Tilney then follows Catherine home to her parents’ house and offers a proposal of marriage together with an explanation of the circumstances leading to the crucial misunderstanding.

An annoying young man named John Thorpe, a friend of Catherine’s brother, himself self-servingly persuaded that Catherine stands in line to inherit considerable wealth and believing out of vanity that she might be persuadable to marry him, inflated Catherine’s prospects and fortune to General Tilney at the theater one night in Bath, and a set of “false calculations” led to the general’s subsequent promotion of the friendship between his son and Catherine (Austen 2003: 182). Once the reader learns all this from the summing-up of that late conversation between Henry Tilney and Catherine, it is possible to go back and see that the narrator has played fair in terms of providing the necessary clues to mark the progress of this hidden story: it has been very clearly established that John Thorpe’s hyperbolic mode of speech rep-resents everything associated with him as far superior to how a third-person observer might rate it, that he has interrogated Catherine about the fortune of the couple who are her hosts in Bath and even – this by way of Catherine’s visual observation of the encounter, at a distance too great to allow her to hear what they are saying – that he conversed with General Tilney one evening at the theater. In retrospect, then, upon rereading, it can be seen that the novel has notated not just the components of the genesis of the falsehood about Catherine but even the means of its transmission to General Tilney.

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In Emma, the game of knowledge transmission has become much more complex, its narrative rules remaining somewhat opaque to the reader even after a loosely com-parable late-stage revelation about a “hidden” story that has taken place alongside the official one (in this case, the story of Frank Churchill’s engagement to Jane Fairfax). By this I mean to say that though the narrator notes certain interactions or pieces of information that might in the most general sense be said to betray something of that hidden story, they are “unreadable” insofar as they fail to offer themselves at the initial time of reading for satisfactory interpretation; in some cases a provisional hypothesis is established about their significance, while in others any significance whatsoever is occluded from view. William Galperin, in an unusual and interesting book called The Historical Austen (2003), claims of Emma that its most astonishing feature is the sup-pression of that courtship narrative (Galperin 2003: 181). He observes that this one crucial aspect of Austen’s novel is only accessible by way of rereading. In part this is because Emma, the character through whose consciousness the narrative is frequently focused and voiced, is herself wholly oblivious to the relationship throughout the time the novel chronicles. (The Knightley brothers both suspect that some kind of an attachment may exist between Frank and Jane, but the narrator doesn’t directly note for the reader enough of these two men’s observations and thoughts to meet, for instance, the conventional obligation of the detective novel in the era of Agatha Christie that the reader should be given sufficient “clues” to piece together the mystery.) Here is what Galperin says about the strangeness of the fashion in which this novel withholds crucial knowledge from the reader:

Part of the problem is that subsequent readings of Emma fail on balance to include the narrator among those who, for want of a better term, we may call the comprehending. Unlike the narrator of Northanger Abbey who, for all her excesses, is plainly mindful, especially on rereading, of the misunderstanding over Catherine’s “fortune” that prompts General Tilney to invite her to the abbey in the first place, the various details surround-ing Frank and Jane, from the former’s chronic attention to the Bateses and their needs to his own need to speak constantly of Jane even if it means derogating her, are duly noted by the narrator without so much as a glimmer of recognition. (182)

This insight is striking: it seems obvious once it’s been made, but it’s something that really hadn’t been noted with such force in any prior criticism, and Galperin repeats the thought in a number of different formulations in order to bring home to the reader how unusual Austen’s narrative choices are in this regard: he says elsewhere that the attachment between Jane and Frank “has been ongoing” but that “until its belated disclosure with the news of their impending marriage in volume 3” it has equally been “invisible to all of the novel’s characters, the narrator included” (203), and he reiterates a few pages later that the courtship “is carried on in secret and is unavailable to the novel’s other participants, including the narrator” (206).

I will put aside some interesting questions that emerge from Galperin’s phrasing (namely, whether the narrator of Northanger Abbey can be indisputably gendered female (“her excesses,” emphasis added) and whether the narrator of Emma can be

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reasonably considered either a character in the novel or a participant in the incidents it narrates) and instead pursue this question of knowledge, who has it and on what basis. Emma is a great novel of misconceptions and riddles: an important scene in volume one hinges on a literal riddle (its answer: “courtship”) and another crucial scene later on features anagrams, while Emma at one point explicitly says of Jane Fairfax that “ ‘[s]he is a riddle, quite a riddle!’ ” (Austen 2008: 223). Some of the misunderstandings of volume one are like those of Midsummer Night’s Dream (a play that Emma quotes with ironic lack of awareness of its true applicability to her and her friends’ situation (60–61)), in the sense that they are delineated and then resolved. Emma has allocated the unctuous clergyman Mr. Elton as a suitor for her friend Harriet Smith, and when Emma’s brother-in-law John Knightley tries to tell her that Mr. Elton seems to be in love with her rather than Harriet, she refutes the suggestion with great satisfaction, “amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into; and not very well pleased with her brother [in law] for imagining her blind and ignorant, and in want of counsel” (89). After Mr. Elton actually proposes to Emma herself rather than to Harriet, however, Emma is pained to think of the wretched business, not just because of “pain and humiliation” for herself but because the “effects of her blunders” extend to Harriet also:

How she could have been so deceived! – He protested that he had never thought seri-ously of Harriet – never! She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it. His manners, however, must have been unmarked, wavering, dubious, or she could not have been so misled. (106)

Emma may not look back with conclusive results, but in this case the narrator has noted matters for the reader in a way that hinted from the start at the real underlying state of things running alongside Emma’s misunderstanding. This is the phenomenon in which Galperin is interested: the definitive difference between how Emma’s misconceptions concerning Mr. Elton are handled by the narrator and the quite different narrative handling – far stranger, more elusive and more profoundly obfuscating – of the relationship between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. In the latter case, the details aren’t hidden in plain sight, in the manner of Poe’s purloined letter or the clues in a Christie novel. Instead, they emerge out of a web of detail in which knowledge itself, the knowledge people have of others and their circum-stances as well as the knowledge narrators have of the imaginary characters whose lives they chronicle, becomes both an obsessive topic of interest and a crucial narra-tive procedure.

Frank Churchill goes to London to get his hair cut and someone sends Jane Fairfax the present of a piano: David Hume had redefined the relationship between cause and effect as a cognitive fiction rather than a fact about experience or the world, and Austen

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pushes very hard, though in a quite different literary mode, on questions about how we understand connections of cause and effect to work. Frank’s haircut is interpreted by Mr. Knightley as the sort of whimsy or extravagance that he sees running through-out Frank’s character (Knightley’s dislike for Frank is itself another riddle, one explained insofar as we understand that it may be motivated by jealousy). In that sense it is a puzzle that is at least provisionally “solved,” even if it will come to have a quite different meaning once we learn, late in the novel, that the haircut chiefly provided a cover story for the arrangements concerning the piano. The riddle of the piano at this juncture of the narrative is also given a provisional solution, with Emma taking it as conclusive evidence of a clandestine romantic attachment between Jane and her friend’s new husband Mr. Dixon. Frank is the only person in a good position to refute this incorrect interpretation of Emma’s, but he chooses not to, since it serves him well as a smokescreen that Jane should be suspected of an attachment to another man. He may also enjoy the element of teasing and tormenting implicit in his collu-sion in Emma’s speculations about Jane.

With regard to the Jane–Frank relationship, it is very much as Galperin says: even upon rereading, the novel seems to have been constructed so as to obscure potential clues rather than to position them for the reader’s attention. When Emma asks Frank how well he knows Jane Fairfax, she doesn’t receive a direct response:

At this moment they were approaching Ford’s, and he hastily exclaimed, “Ha! This must be the very shop that every body attends every day of their lives, as my father informs me . . . If it be not inconvenient to you, pray let us go in . . . I must buy something at Ford’s.” (157)

A deflection, a clear deflection: but we only know that in retrospect, and it is also seen much more easily when the lines are excerpted from the ongoing narrative in a critical essay than when they are encountered in the flow of regular narration. The adverb “hastily” is perhaps the only clue that something’s up – the narrator doesn’t impute a specific motive to Frank, but deems there to be something notable in his manner. Hastiness of manner might speak simply to flightiness or distractibility, of course, rather than to a desire to circumvent an unwanted line of questioning, and the novel’s copious provision of seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant detail in the matter of village life tends to obscure the telling or significant detail; because of this, the possibility that Frank’s turning the conversation to a new topic might have an ulterior motive may be nearly invisible even to the rereader.

Not long after this scene, Emma sees “Frank Churchill looking intently across the room at Miss Fairfax, who was sitting exactly opposite” (174). Frank offers Emma a cover story of sorts – he finds Jane’s hairstyle odd, and threatens to act on an urge to go and tease her about it by asking her if it is “an Irish fashion” (alluding to the purported flirtation with Jane’s friend’s Irish husband that has already afforded Emma so much pleasurable speculation). Instructing Emma to watch and “see how she takes it; — whether she colours,” he goes to Jane: “but as to its effect on the young lady,”

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the narrator observes, “as he had improvidently placed himself exactly between them, exactly in front of Miss Fairfax, she could absolutely distinguish nothing.” “Improvi-dently” is the sort of Latinate word that produces a vaguely satirical effect – it is loosely Johnsonian – while the repetition of the modifier “exactly” and the use of “absolutely” as some kind of verbal intensifier begin to suggest that this is free indi-rect speech, with the narrator momentarily bringing to life Emma’s acute though ephemeral frustration at having a potentially interesting and revealing encounter blocked from her view. Even that double “exactly,” though, doesn’t cue readerly sus-picion of Frank’s motives, mostly because Emma herself is so profoundly oblivious to them.

Frank, though, may think that Emma knows something, and in a scene shortly following this one, his own consciousness of his secrets prompts a more deeply equivo-cal exchange between himself and Emma. He is about to leave Highbury, and tells Emma, when she asks (unkindly) whether he stopped to pay his farewells to Jane Fairfax and her garrulous aunt Miss Bates, that indeed he did so. With the hindsight of rereading, we can see that Frank takes Emma’s teasing about the Fairfax/Bates friendship as something almost like an invitation to confess his secret attachment to Jane Fairfax, but Emma instead believes him to be on the verge of proposing marriage to Emma herself:

He hesitated, got up, walked to a window.“In short,” said he, “perhaps, Miss Woodhouse—I think you can hardly be quite

without suspicion”—He looked at her, as if wanting to read her thoughts. She hardly knew what to say.

It seemed like the forerunner of something absolutely serious, which she did not wish. Forcing herself to speak, therefore, in the hope of putting it by, she calmly said,

“You were quite in the right; it was most natural to pay your visit, then”—He was silent. She believed he was looking at her, probably reflecting on what she

had said, and trying to understand the manner. She heard him sigh. It was natural for him to feel that he had cause to sigh. He could not believe her to be encouraging him. (204)

In other words, Emma has read Frank’s manner aright, insofar as she senses his desire to tell her something very personal, only she has also completely mistaken the nature of the feelings he may wish to impart.

I have already suggested that this aspect of the narration is tantalizingly oblique to the point of indeterminacy, but there is perhaps one important exception that counterbalances that obliquity. It represents a narrative anomaly of sorts, and for that reason is worthy of closer examination. The third-person narration of Emma the novel closely follows the point of view of Emma the character: conversations at which she is present are reported fairly fully, others on the whole not. (Free indirect style is a versatile enough mode that it doesn’t lock the novelist in too literally to a particular point of view, but it could be said in this case that there’s a fairly strong general

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alignment.) The last volume of the novel, though, includes one chapter in which the narrator realigns with Mr. Knightley’s point of view, and the specific prompt for that narrative realignment is the character’s growing suspicion of “some double dealing in [Frank’s] pursuit of Emma” (269). The passage that lays out the scope of Mr. Knight-ley’s concerns is richly suggestive in its language:

While so many were devoting him to Emma, and Emma herself making him over to Harriet, Mr. Knightley began to suspect him of some inclination to trifle with Jane Fairfax. He could not understand it; but there were symptoms of intelligence between them – he thought so at least – symptoms of admiration on his side, which, having once observed, he could not persuade himself to think entirely void of meaning, however he might wish to escape any of Emma’s errors of imagination. She was not present when the suspicion first arose. He was dining with the Randalls’ family, and Jane, at the Eltons’; and he had seen a look, more than a single look, at Miss Fairfax, which, from the admirer of Miss Woodhouse, seemed somewhat out of place. When he was again in their company, he could not help remembering what he had seen; nor could he avoid observations which, unless it were like Cowper and his fire at twilight,

“Myself creating what I saw,”brought him yet stronger suspicion of there being a something of private liking, of private understanding even, between Frank Churchill and Jane. (270)

To “suspect” is never simply and neutrally to extrapolate from a piece of evidence and draw a conclusion: it implies the detection of guilt. The phrase “symptoms of intelligence” is equally suggestive: symptoms invites us to consider this as an act of diagnosis (it calls to mind something of Sherlock Holmes avant la lettre – Conan Doyle modeled the Sherlockian skills of observation and deduction on the diagnos-tics of his medical school professor Joseph Bell), while intelligence has connotations of espionage or of information covertly exchanged (the particular sense is probably closest to that provided by the Oxford English Dictionary as definition 8, “A basis of communication or a relation between people or parties; an understanding between or with”). The Cowper allusion is introduced negatively (“unless it were like” – but it is not!), putting us roundly in the realm of empiricist observation rather than imagi-native invention.

In casual conversation, Frank asks Mrs. Weston what became of Mr. Perry’s plan to set up a carriage, which he says he heard about from her in a letter, but she disavows any knowledge (past or present) of such a plan: Frank turns the topic elsewhere, and when his father seizes on the detail and asks whether he might have had it directly from Perry, Frank says that he seems to have had it “ ‘from nobody’ ”: “Very odd! – I really was persuaded of Mrs. Weston’s having mentioned it in one of her letters to Enscombe, many weeks ago, with all these particulars – but as she declares she never heard a syllable of it before, of course it must have been a dream” (271). Mr. Weston comments on the real oddity of Frank’s having had “such a regular connected dream about people whom it was not very likely you should be thinking of at Enscombe,” adding (it is a clever comment by the novelist on the principles and procedures of

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fictional realism), “What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream!” Indeed Austen is laying a trail for us to follow along with Mr. Knightley, as Miss Bates now allows as how she was herself in possession of this precise piece of informa-tion, though she stops short of speculating as to the exact means of its transmission to Frank: “it was quite a secret, known to nobody else, and only thought of about three days,” she observes, thereby further pinning down the exact period in which the information might have been disseminated (272). Mrs. Perry had mentioned the idea to Mrs. Bates in confidence:

she had no objection to her telling us, of course, but it was not to go beyond: and, from that day to this, I never mentioned it to a soul that I know of. At the same time, I will not positively answer for my having never dropt a hint, because I know I do sometimes pop out a thing before I am aware. I am a talker, you know; I am rather a talker; and now and then I have let a thing escape me which I should not. I am not like Jane; I wish I were. I will answer for it she never betrayed the least thing in the world. Where is she? – Oh! just behind. Perfectly remember Mrs. Perry’s coming. – Extraordinary dream indeed!

The “us” of the first line refers to Miss Bates and Jane, but it remains completely unclear whether Miss Bates at this point knows of Jane’s correspondence with Frank (and by extension of the engagement) or whether her associations are more random and less pointed in terms of what they tell us. It is a question that invites speculation but that can’t be answered on the basis of the available information, not even at the novel’s conclusion.

The following paragraph gives us more information without significantly clarifying that particular puzzle concerning knowledge:

They were entering the hall. Mr. Knightley’s eyes had preceded Miss Bates’s in a glance at Jane. From Frank Churchill’s face, where he thought he saw confusion suppressed or laughed away, he had involuntarily turned to her’s; but she was indeed behind, and too busy with her shawl. Mr. Weston had walked in. The two other gentlemen waited at the door to let her pass. Mr. Knightley suspected in Frank Churchill the determination of catching her eye – he seemed watching her intently – in vain, however, if it were so – Jane passed between them into the hall, and looked at neither.

It is a negative kind of evidence – Jane’s unwillingness to meet Frank’s knowing eye itself becomes a point of further suspicion – but the scene it leads to contains further evidence of private intelligence between the two. The party, once they have had their tea, begin to play a game with a set of alphabets previously used by Emma’s nephews, each person using the letters to form words for another to unjumble. Frank places a word before Jane Fairfax: “Frank was next to Emma, Jane opposite to them – and Mr. Knightley so placed as to see them all; and it was his object to see as much as he could, with as little apparent observation. The word was discovered, and with a faint smile pushed away” (273). In context, it’s clear that the agent in the case is Frank,

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and the sweeper-away Jane, though it is striking that the phrasing suppresses any person’s part in the exchange: it is almost as though the narrator affords Jane a veil of modesty here, perhaps because Knightley is unwilling to put her in the position of active subject and make her complicit in the exchange. As it happens, the letters don’t get mixed back into the original bunch, though, and Harriet takes them and asks Mr. Knightley to help her sort out their meaning: “The word was blunder; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible” (273). It takes multiple systems of signification to bestow meaning – the simple word was initially introduced without sufficient context to mean anything in particular to an onlooker, pending the additional con-firmation of the blush.

One final note on the narrative withholding of certainty – and on the strangeness of knowledge in Austen’s novel – may arise as a gloss to the observation that as Jane and her aunt leave, “Mr. Knightley thought he saw another collection of letters anx-iously pushed towards her, and resolutely swept away by her unexamined” (274). This is a literal puzzle that goes really and truly unsolved. Jane chooses not to sort out the correct order of the letters, declining Frank’s message absolutely; Frank knows what the word was, but he doesn’t tell anyone else, and Mr. Knightley doesn’t see it either. It is in this sense another moment of deep narrative indeterminacy: we are told, at least through Mr. Knightley’s observations and deductions, of Frank’s desire to com-municate something, but the novel simply won’t tell us what he wanted to say. The note to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Emma, though, tells us that “according to Austen family tradition, the word was ‘pardon’ ” (401n74; the underlying reference is to LeFaye 1987: 216). The fact of the withholding, and of the playful speculation that led Austen to provide such extra-canonical details, as it were, gives another angle on the extent to which Austen is interested not just in human relationships but in human cognition. Perhaps the withholding of the word pardon is matched by one final moment of ostentatious narratorial reticence. Mr. Knightley has professed his love for Emma and asked whether she can return his feelings, but rather than homing in close enough that we can hear her answer, the narrator moves further away from the couple, casting a veil over the sight or rather the sound of Emma’s verbal response to the proposal:

She spoke then, on being so entreated. – What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. – She said enough to show there need not be despair – and to invite him to say more himself. (339)

This unwillingness to specify might be justified on the grounds of protecting female modesty; it might be coyness, it might be a willful resisting of the particular imperative of representation calling for full and particular detail. It is an eminently suitable narrative gesture, though, for the resolution of a marriage plot that has been so subtly and intellectually preoccupied with the communication and transmission of knowledge.

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