“We must stem the tide of malice,” Mary Bennet says to her sister Elizabeth after they learn that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, has run off to London with Mr. Wickham, “and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation.” Elizabeth can only “[lift] up her eyes in amazement” at this suggestion, and is “too much oppressed to make any reply. Mary, however, continued to console herself with such kind of moral extractions from the evil before them.”
As it happens, Elizabeth never finds herself able to reply to Mary under any circumstance; she does not speak to Mary once in the entirety of Pride and Prejudice. She is occasionally sorry for Mary, sometimes “in agonies” over her behavior in public, and often mortified by her badly-timed aphorisms, but whenever Mary tries to address Elizabeth in particular, Elizabeth falls pointedly silent. In this Elizabeth is characteristic of Austen heroines: she’s profoundly ashamed of her relatives and (mostly) unwilling to say so. Mary’s unique brand of vanity and ignorance demands silence. Elizabeth is never witty at her expense, which suggests a carefully constructed shield of protective silence, since she so often deploys witty remarks in order to bear bad or foolish behavior. Jane she adores, Lydia and Kitty she will happily criticize to her father if the situation calls for it, but with Mary she can only observe the principle that “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
If you are a character of importance in a Jane Austen novel, your mother is likely either dead (Emma, Persuasion) or incredibly socially embarrassing (Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park). The sibling relationship is a much likelier field for displays of growth, affection, and fidelity.
If your mother is dead, you almost immediately received a replacement of equal or greater value. Good mothers are sensible, excellent, and fungible. They anticipate their own deaths, and they make the necessary arrangements in advance; they do not insist on uniqueness. Emma Woodhouse’s mother died “too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses; and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess.” Anne Elliot’s mother, who receives the highest praise of any of Austen’s mothers as an “excellent woman, sensible and amiable,” arranged for her own substitution before dying in the form of Lady Russell, “one very intimate friend, a sensible, deserving woman, who had been brought, by strong attachment to herself, to settle close by.” After Lady Elliot’s death, we are told that Lady Russell “had almost a mother’s love, and mother’s rights” towards Anne.
Lady Russell is less successful with Anne’s two lousy sisters, having “scarcely any influence with Elizabeth” and barely registering as a person at all to Mary. Anne has the worst luck in siblings in all of Austen, worse even than Fanny Price, who at least has William as a correspondent. The highest praise the narrator of Persuasion can give to Anne’s younger sister Mary is that she “was not so repulsive and unsisterly as Elizabeth, nor so inaccessible to all influence of hers.” No Austen heroine escapes siblinghood; Jane does not concern herself with only children. For the most part, sisters begin as they mean to go on: those who love one another at the beginning of a book will remain close at the end of it, while sisters who dislike each other tend to remain embattled or even become estranged. Exceptions include the Steele sisters in Sense and Sensibility (Lucy learns not to confide in Anne after Anne betrays the secret of her engagement to Fanny Dashwood, and even gets some of her own back by stealing the last of Anne’s pin-money in order to elope with Robert Ferrars); Kitty and Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (they are as close as Jane and Elizabeth throughout most of the book, encouraging one another into new displays of ignorance and thoughtlessness, but are kept separate after Lydia’s elopement, to Kitty’s eventual improvement); and Julia and Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park. Julia and Maria are introduced as a matched pair, unanimous in their casual disdain for their poor cousin Fanny, but they quickly grow apart in adulthood and are first divided by their rivalry for Henry Crawford, a separation which becomes permanent after Maria’s attachment to Henry forces her removal from polite society.
The sister with whom she was used to be on easy terms was now become her greatest enemy: they were alienated from each other; and Julia was not superior to the hope of some distressing end to the attentions which were still carrying on there, some punishment to Maria for conduct so shameful towards herself as well as towards Mr. Rushworth. With no material fault of temper, or difference of opinion, to prevent their being very good friends while their interests were the same, the sisters, under such a trial as this, had not affection or principle enough to make them merciful or just, to give them honor or compassion.
Brother-sister pairs tend to get along well in Austen (although half-brothers are dicey, as with John Dashwood’s abandonment of his duty towards his younger half-sisters in Sense and Sensibility). Fanny and William Price plan to set up housekeeping together after he gets out of the Navy: “It was William whom she talked of most” during her first removal to Mansfield Park, “her constant companion and friend; her advocate with her mother (of whom he was the darling) in every distress.” Mary and Henry Crawford are teasingly critical but in reality each thinks very highly of the other (“She loves nobody but herself and her brother,” Fanny thinks during a particularly uncharitable moment), and Mr. Darcy’s careful solicitude for his younger sister Georgiana extracts one of Elizabeth’s first concessions that he might be an admirable person after all: “‘He certainly is a good brother,’ said Elizabeth, as she walked towards one of the windows” during her visit to Pemberley. Mrs. Reynolds, Darcy’s housekeeper, agrees that “This is always the way with him. Whatever can give his sister any pleasure, is sure to be done in a moment. There is nothing he would not do for her.” This type of familial affection often draws favorable attention on the marriage market: Elizabeth starts to reconsider just how amiable a husband such an attentive brother might make, while in Mansfield Park Henry Crawford’s increasingly-sincere interest in Fanny Price is piqued by her affection for William: “Her affections were evidently strong. To see her with her brother! What could more delightfully prove that the warmth of her heart was equal to its gentleness? What could be more encouraging to a man who had her love in view?” Where every aspect of daily life must be funneled into the marriage market; affectionate sisters and devoted brothers make for appealing wives- and husbands-in-training. It is her psychological connection with William that enables Fanny to survive her repressive upbringing at Mansfield with any sense of self intact. She transfers, but does not replace, her love for William onto her cousin Edmund, and it is only this semi-closeted love for both ‘brothers’ that enables her to reject Henry Crawford’s proposals despite mounting pressure (the Bertrams want Fanny to marry out, while Fanny wants to marry further into the family; even her disobedience is filial).
Austen’s best living mothers are Northanger Abbey’s Mrs. Morland — whose highest qualifications are her “useful plain sense [and] good temper” and the fact that she has avoided dying in childbirth — and Sense and Sensibility’s Mrs. Dashwood, who is volatile, imprudent, and whose most frequent financial advisor is her nineteen-year-old daughter Elinor (whose ability to govern her own feelings is a “knowledge which her mother had yet to learn”). Yet Mrs. Morland is so busy “in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves,” while Elinor must encourage Mrs. Dashwood into forbearance and politeness, like a party whip. Yet Mrs. Dashwood is only occasionally governable, while Mrs. Morland, we learn, is “not happy in her attempt at consolation” of Catherine; neither mother becomes much more effective, insightful, or socially fluent throughout her narrative. If Mrs. Dashwood is any better at the end of the novel than she was at the beginning, it is only in becoming a little more like Elinor, usually after trying as hard as possible not to do so, if she can possibly help it.
Jane Austen heroines all serve as improvements on their mothers and mother-figures, either in talent, character, or both, although one of the indicators of their superiority is that they will never admit it. Miss Taylor, Emma’s governess who had “fallen little short of a mother in affection” is demoted in the very next paragraph, in which we learn that “between [Emma and Miss Taylor] it was more the intimacy of sisters…the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked.” Even the extremely loyal Anne Elliot admits to Captain Wentworth that Lady Russell did “err in her advice” to break off their engagement eight years ago, while still maintaining that she herself had been “right in submitting to her,” a neat little trick whereby Lady Russell was wrong to begin with, but Anne was right in going along with her as a sign of respect — “My mother, right or wrong.”
Where do these excellent heroines, with their occasional, forgivable, likable faults, derive their excellence? The best mothers among them are critically absent, wrong-thinking, badly informed, or misguided. The worst of them are anxious and self-obsessed (Mrs. Bennet), stupid and hypochondriacal (Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Price), indolent and unimaginative (Lady Bertram) — very often worse than no mothers at all. Fathers are not much better. Mr. Bennet and Sir Thomas Bertram are the best of the bunch, and they barely know their children. Mr. Woodhouse is kind-hearted and impossible, Sir Walter Eliot is mortifying, and Mr. Henry Dashwood fails to suitably provide for his daughters before dying. No heroine finds a friend in her parents. The intelligent ones are indifferent, the kind ones are unreliable, the rest are scarcely worth ignoring. It is only in her siblings that she can look for anything like real companionship, equality of terms, and unrestrained affection: “Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connexion can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so. Fraternal love, sometimes almost everything, is at others worse than nothing.”
Sisters, in Jane Austen, are either the best of friends (Jane and Elizabeth, Kitty and Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, particularly after Marianne stops resisting Elinor’s attempts to mother her) or absolute pills designed to make the heroine look even better by comparison (Mary and Elizabeth in Persuasion, Maria and Julia Bertram in Mansfield Park). This rings true to the experience of childhood: Who has ever felt, growing up, that their sister was merely okay? Depending on the day, she was either the greatest confidant, resource, and companion tailor-made to give your life greater meaning, or the wicked, insurgent agent you were forced to share a trundle bed with by forces beyond your ken.