How did I not know Jane Austen was a vicious bitch?

All my life, I’ve thought of Jane Austen novels as the kind where women constrained by a society that won’t permit them any real adventures express themselves in the few ways permitted to them. A glance here or there, a few choice words at the emotional climax, maybe some fainting. But even in their anger Austen’s heroines are never truly cruel. That’s why we like them, because despite the pressures of their society they react with grace. 

In fact, Austen’s heroines are so gentle that I could never relate to them growing up. I was far more attuned to Emily Brontë’’s fiery Catherine who rolled around the moors with Heathcliff and then, on her death-bed, accused him of killing her. The brutality of Wuthering Heights spoke to my angry teenage self in ways Jane Austen did not. 

But now, as an adult, in the wake of the spectacularly bad Persuasion movie I had to re-read the book, because even though I didn’t quite subscribe to Anne Elliott’s brand of quiet, observant angst, I respected it enough to cringe at the sassy, feisty, boozy version. Then, a few pages in I found this passage, about a certain dead young man:

“The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross two years before. 

He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him ‘poor Richard,’ been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done any thing to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead.”

OUCH.

She brought the knives on this guy. 

Of course, Austen’s narrative is closer to omniscient than a close third, so we aren’t really in Anne Elliott’s head at this point, but we’re certainly in Austen’s. And she spared no adjectives here. Unprofitable? Poor guy wasn’t even twenty!

Still don’t like the Dakota Johnson version of Anne Elliott, but I’m realizing I was unfair to dismiss Jane Austen as a mild, cozy writer incapable of real rage.