‘The Great Mrs Churchill was No More’: Death in Jane Austen’s Novels

Death was a common occurrence in Jane Austen’s life. Her father died in 1805; her friend Mrs Lefroy was killed in an accident in 1804; her sister’s fiancé died in 1797. In the songs she sang and played, death was a recurrent theme, with sentimental and melodramatic lyrics vowing fidelity unto death, or mourning the passing of a lover or a sister. However, death usually keeps to the background of the emotional landscape of her novels. No character we ‘know’ well dies in the course of any of the novels, although some – Marianne Dashwood, Tom Bertram, Louisa Musgrove – may be in mortal danger. Deaths ‘offstage’ can liberate characters, like Eleanor Tilney and Frank Churchill. Other deaths, typically of parents before a novel’s action begins, put the main characters in perilous financial situations, or deprive them of essential moral and emotional support at an early age. The few examples where a child or young person has died – Fanny Price’s sister, Captain Benwick’s fiancée, Dick Musgrove – provide perceptive portrayals of characters grieving in their idiosyncratic ways. In this essay I aim to explore whether particular deaths are ever much more than plot devices in Austen’s novels. To what extent does the form of comedy constrain her from dealing with darker themes? Does her resistance to melodrama and sentimentality mean that she avoids deaths or intimations of mortality in the six completed works, or can grief and the fear of death undercut the gaiety of even the most light-hearted of her novels, and pervade the shadowy depths of the more serious works?