Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad

This is the first in a series of ‘Jane Austen and’ articles, comparing my favourite author, Jane Austen, with other writers. It will be a quirky and entirely personal series, so you can expect George Eliot and maybe T. S. Eliot, but never Charles Dickens (bleah). There’ll be The Tale of Genji, Virginia Woolf and Ursula Le Guin, James Branch Cabell and Mervyn Peake. But not Salman Rushdie or Kazuo Ishiguro. I hope you enjoy this venture. If you do, please feel free to engage by liking or responding, and you can find out more about me and my work at https://rnswan.com.

In the last year, I have been re-reading a lot of Conrad alongside Jane Austen. They are two of the great English novelists, but whereas Austen inspires fervid devotion, Conrad doesn’t. I want to consider why this is so.

It would be easy to say that Austen is a ‘woman’s writer’ and Conrad is a ‘man’s writer’, but this is too simplistic. I’m a man, and I admire Austen as much as (if not more than) Conrad. Equally, it would be easy to say that Conrad is a depressing writer (Heart of Darkness is not exactly cheery), while Austen is uplifting. That would be simplistic too. So the question is worth some deliberation. The superficial disparity between the two authors masks much more important similarities.

They both have a profound moral seriousness. In Conrad that is perhaps best embodied in Marlow, whose narratives are not merely stories but moral tales: ‘to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.’ When he concludes, ‘I assert that Kurtz was a remarkable man,’ we accept both the moral weight and the ambivalence of that judgment. For Austen, the key character is Fanny Price, the unswerving moral centre not only of Mansfield Park but of the whole Austen oeuvre. Against her standard is every Austen character judged, or judgeable. When we read in Persuasion: ‘Vanity was the beginning of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation,’ we know that Fanny would condemn him absolutely. It is notable that both Fanny and Marlow are primarily observers rather than agents. Their function is to act as the authors’ touchstones, by which the reader can assess the moral worth of the characters they encounter.

Austen and Conrad are both supreme stylists. They weigh and assess the value of every word and the structure of every sentence. Austen’s tend to be light and delicate, but loaded with significance: ‘There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste’ (Lady Catherine De Bourgh). Conrad’s are more directly assertive. Here he describes a French man-of-war, firing at Africa: ‘In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.’ As well as the absurdity — and colonial depravity — of the concept of attacking a continent, it is the placement and the weight of the word ‘incomprehensible’ that focuses Conrad’s meaning. With both authors, the reader savours the elegance and economy of the wording, not merely its content.

Key to their styles is the use of irony, which works at both local and strategic level. Austen is famous for hers: ‘She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.’ Austen conveys an entire character and situation in a single sentence. Conrad is equally adept (here in An Outpost of Progress): ‘He looked round like a man who has lost his way; and he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped stain, upon the shifting purity of the mist.’ There are complex ironies here, including inverted Christian imagery, with a sinister (man-made) cross contrasted with the ‘purity’ of the natural mist. As so often, Conrad implies the debased nature of civilisation compared with the naturalness of the surrounding wilderness, because the man who has ‘lost his way’ turns to the cross not for salvation, but to hang himself.

With both authors, irony stretches across whole works. Emma is a novel-length study of self-deception, with Emma only gaining clarity of vision at the very end. Persuasion is built on the contrast between Sir Walter’s vanity and Anne’s modesty. Works like Heart of Darkness and An Outpost of Progress (both titles being irony signposts in themselves) are devoted to exposing the hollowness of ‘civilised’ standards. Kurtz, it will be remembered, is ‘hollow at the core’.

There is also the matter of tone. Austen remains light even at moments which could, in other circumstances, be turned into tragedy. We enjoy it when Mr Bennet says to Elizabeth: ‘From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do,’ but it is easy to imagine how Thomas Hardy would have treated this scene in one of his darker moods. Austen — like Shakespeare — is always alive to the seriousness underlying the comic situations. Compared with Austen, Conrad’s tone is invariably serious, and frequently dark: ‘I did not betray Mr Kurtz — it was ordered I should never betray him — it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.’

Maybe the greatest apparent divergence between the two writers is in their central protagonists. Conrad, in each novel, explores a character who is displaced, and isolated because of it. Almayer, Verloc, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Kurtz — all are detached from their natural sphere, and Conrad studies the effect of this separation on them. The acme (sic) is reached with Axel Heyst in Victory, who is quite literally isolated on a mountainous island (isola): ‘He was out of everybody’s way, as if he were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous.’ Usefully, this image reveals the way Conrad works. He separates out an individual and brings light to bear on them, deliberately makes them conspicuous. Austen’s characters appear to be more integrated, part of the societies they inhabit. Yet this is not quite true. Catherine Morland, the Dashwoods, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Emma — are all isolated in some way. Anne is estranged in her opinions both from her pretentious family and her over-cautious friend Lady Russell; Emma’s social pre-eminence gives her a false sense of her own authority. Fanny is doubly isolated, displaced from her natural home and at sea amongst the denizens of Mansfield Park: ‘Fanny, whether near or far from her cousins, whether in the school-room, the drawing-room, or the shrubbery, was equally forlorn, finding something to fear in every person and place.’ Like Conrad, Austen then explores the effects of these circumstances on the characters.

Finally, there is the matter of setting. Austen’s novels are set in the comfortable classes and the comfortable shires of early nineteenth century England. However distant the characters are in class, manners and behaviour from our own times, they feel familiar, even cosy. There are no Gothic horrors (except in Catherine Morland’s imaginings), no shocking violence or murders. By contrast, Conrad’s settings seem more distant. Most are geographically exotic (for an English reader): the trading ports of the Far East, or the (fictionalised) South American country in Nostromo. And the characters seem more extreme, further from our own lives and preoccupations.

So what can we conclude? Logically the two writers seem worthy of equal devotion, but they don’t get it. Is it easier for devotees to dress up in Georgian clothes than as Eastern sailors? Is it a question of setting and tone? I think there is more to it. The fact is that people tend to have a very personal relationship with Jane Austen — ‘my Jane Austen’. Her voice seems to speak individually and in confidence to each reader, so that there is a sense of connection and immediacy that defies the two-hundred-year gap in time. ‘As to the management of their children, his theory was much better than his wife’s, and his practice not so bad.’ Conrad, a century younger, seems further off, more aloof and austere, even when Marlow’s voice is at its most colloquial: ‘You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me.’

Both these authors are amongst my favourites, and it is fascinating to pause for a moment and consider them side by side. This is the approach I will apply to further writers, in each case using Jane Austen as the foundation on which to build a comparison.