Read What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved for Free Online

interrupted him. “I declare, Charles, I never heard him mention Anne twice all the time I was there”’ (I. ii). She is always ready to make an objection. ‘Good heavens, Charles! how can you think of such a thing? . . . Oh! Charles, I declare it will be too abominable if you do . . . But you must go, Charles. It would be unpardonable to fail’ (II. xxiv). Charles Musgrove in turn addresses his wife as ‘Mary’ when he wishes to contradict her. ‘Now you are talking nonsense, Mary’(I. ix); ‘Now Mary, you know very well how it really was. It was all your doing . . . Now Mary, I declare it was so, I heard it myself, and you were in the other room’ (II. ii).
    Any keen reader of Austen will register, though perhaps only half-consciously, the weight of this. For even the fondest of Austen’s other wives find some alternative to using their husbands’ Christian names. Mrs Croft may be ‘Sophy’ to her husband, but he is ‘my dear admiral’ to her. Mr Weston may address his wife as ‘Anne, my dear’, but she calls him ‘Mr. Weston’. The Weston example is particularly striking as we are hearing this recently married couple talking without any witnesses and therefore without any need for formality. We never know Mr Weston’s forename – nor Mr Allen’s, Mr Palmer’s, Mr Bennet’s, Dr Grant’s, or Admiral Croft’s. Even Mrs Elton has to find a nauseating endearment – ‘Mr. E’ – rather than brandish her husband’s Christian name ( Emma , II. xiv). Will none of Austen’s heroines use their beloved husband’s first names after marriage? Elinor Dashwood might do so when she has become Elinor Ferrars, as her husband has long been ‘Edward’ to her family. He has qualified by already being a relative by marriage. Elizabeth Bennet might be put off doing so by her husband’s cumbersome Christian name, Fitzwilliam. But surely Anne Elliot will call Captain Wentworth ‘Frederick’? At least in private? We cannot know, but nothing in the talk between married couples in the novels encourages us to think that she will.
    The nature of the Musgrove marriage is revealed to us by this small touch: their use of each other’s first names. It is no sign of amorous feeling (Charles has married Mary, after all, because Anne would not have him). Rather, it dramatises the companionable disrespect of their relationship. They complain about each other, but in a fatalistic vein, and they also complain in unison, about the failure of Charles’s parents to give them more money. They cannot agree about many things, but are not afraid to disagree. They bicker, but they take their social pleasures together. Neither admirable nor wholly improper, their informality in naming each other epitomises this relationship. In Austen’s novels, as here, we should notice conventions about how people name others in order to see how they are disobeyed – or to see that different characters follow different conventions. Charlotte Heywood in Sanditon notes Lady Denham’s ‘oldfashioned formality’ towards her young companion, and distant relation, ‘of always calling her Miss Clar a ’ (Ch. 6). But clearly some conventions have a near-moral force. After Maria Bertram gets married, she is always ‘Mrs. Rushworth’ to both Fanny and the narrator. To call her anything else, even in one’s thoughts, would be to undo her marital ties. And this is just what Henry Crawford desires. Encountering her coldness, ‘he must get the better of it, and make Mrs. Rushworth Maria Bertram again in her treatment of himself’ (III. xvii).
    Informality between spouses is not symmetrical. In the second chapter of Sense and Sensibility , John Dashwood calls his wife ‘My dear Fanny’, though she addresses him as ‘My dear Mr. Dashwood’ (I. ii). ‘Shall we walk, Augusta?’ says Mr Elton to his wife in front of the group at Box Hill. This is almost ostentatious. ‘Happy creature! He called her ”Augusta.” How delightful!’ says Harriet