A Lecture by Shannon Chamberlain
Sir Walter Elliott would much prefer to spend time with his Debrett’s Peerage than with his daughters. Mrs Bennet—a “woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper”—sends one of hers out in a downpour in mad pursuit of an eligible bachelor. Mr. Woodhouse has little time for anything but his own ailments. And let’s not even get started on Lady Susan, the epitome of indifferent motherhood in Jane Austen’s novels and juvenilia.
This is, in other words, a cast of characters that is difficult to defend. But a partial exoneration is the goal of this lecture, which attempts a sympathetic look at some of Austen’s parents as figures caught in the flux of changing Enlightenment attitudes about the role of the parent. Their central predicament—how to prepare their children for a world whose rules that they increasingly don’t understand, and balance happiness against the need for self-support and realism—is deeply familiar to modern parents, and one which the childless Austen treats more sensitively and generously than she appears to at first glance, with a keen and ironic eye towards the ways that we must always find new ways to hew a middle road between the extremes of theory and practice, indulgence and stoicism, and the old and the new.
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