Morland to be a good but rather casual mother, neglecting the matter of her daughter Catherine’s moral development and such important issues as how to distinguish the real world from its romantic shadow. And Lady Russell, Anne Elliot’s well-meaning, prudent surrogate mother in Persuasion, actively interferes, urging Anne to reject her suitor, Captain Wentworth, and thereby launching the novel’s action.

A close bond between mothers and daughters is rare in the Austen novels, but then mothering styles are forever in a state of change. The sentimental, smothering mother of Victorian fiction had not yet evolved. Childhood, too, has its different modes and expectations, and it was almost certainly shorter in the eighteenth century than it is today, with a brief period of innocent dependency followed by rapid absorption into adult society.

Of Jane Austen’s mother we know only a little. She was an accomplished versifier all her life, delighting in rhymes and rhythm, and her light verse, even after all these years and even considering the private references, still gives pleasure. Suggested glimpses of hypochondria or peevishness envelop her in later life—each of these glimpses gestures toward and secures a hundred others, as is often the case when biographical documentation is scarce. Jane Austen, in her final illness, reports she was too weak to walk upstairs and so she sometimes rested on three sitting-room chairs lined up together, leaving the sofa for her mother. What can we make of this improbable scene? Did her mother not notice the unusual furniture deployment? Or was Jane Austen in the full throes of a bizarre martyrdom? Were the mother and daughter playing out an old and rivalrous claim? Or was Mrs. Austen—and this is the interpretation that has hardened in the record—a demanding and self-absorbed woman, careless of her daughter’s comfort and too insensitive to see the signs of serious illness?

Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, in what looks like a dropped comment but which, examined, holds an armful of meaning: “I like the Gown very much & my Mother thinks it very ugly.” The balance of that particular sentence suggests an imbalance of sensibility. The repetition of the word “very” forms a kind of code that Cassandra would be sure to understand. Mrs. Austen was geared to opposition, to stances that were negative.

We do know she was a strong, clever woman from a slightly higher ledge of the gentry than her husband, that she was occasionally caustic in the verses she wrote, and later, like Mrs. Bennet, was anxious about her unmarried daughters. But how could she not have been, and have we as readers been completely fair to Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice ? A good marriage was the only real hope for young women of Mrs. Bennet’s class, though marriage, with its new dangers and surrenders, often presented a form of martyrdom. Mrs. Bennet, always broadly played on the screen, may, in fact, be something of a solid realist, embedded in her economic matrix, concerned, and with Darwinian reason, about her nest of unmarried daughters. Her husband, on the other hand, affectionately put forward in film, is seen on close textual inspection to be foolish in his own particularly fastidious and reluctant manner. His wife urges him to call on the newly arrived, large-fortuned Mr. Bingley, but he turns this advice away with sarcastic humor and reserve, and yet we suspect—we know!—he is going to make that call. He is, after all, the straitened father of five daughters; he understands as well as Mrs. Bennet that the call is necessary.

Mrs. Bennet is also the only family member to welcome Lydia back home after her scandalous elopement. This cry of triumph has been interpreted as social pride on her part: At last she has one married daughter, at last she can hold up her head. But there is something of loyalty here as well: a mother’s rejoicing in a daughter’s happiness, a mother’s forgiveness of outrageous and shameful behavior, a generosity that prevails against the rest of the family’s hardness of heart. Even Elizabeth is immune to Lydia’s happiness, closer to being contemptuous and ashamed.

Mrs. Austen, Jane Austen’s mother, may or may not have had a spirit similar to Mrs. Bennet’s. However little we know about her, we can be certain she was a preoccupied woman, since an eighth child, Charles, followed not long after Jane’s birth, enlarging an already bursting household.