Dull elves
I’m going to reference this sooner or later, so I want the full citation. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, circa the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen said the following about printer’s errors she’d found in the text:
“There are a few Typical errors—& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear.” No matter, though, she continues, “I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.”
It’s a quote, or rather paraphrase, from the second-to-last stanza of Marmion by Walter Scott, where the reader is encouraged to imagine how the hero and heroine are united and how the stray plot threads will be tied up:
“I do not rhyme to that dull elf,
Who cannot image to himself,
That all through Flodden’s dismal night,
Wilton was foremost in the fight;
….
Nor sing I to that simple maid,
To whom it must in terms be said,
That King and kinsmen did agree,
To bless fair Clara’s constancy;
Who cannot, unless I relate,
Paint to her mind the bridal’s state.”
Helena Kelly, in Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, adds:
This stanza, the stanza that pops into Jane’s head when she’s thinking about how her newly appeared novel will be read, deals with what an author can expect a reader to do. It’s about the author’s desire for readers who can join the dots, follow implications and allusions through to their natural conclusions, who can “image” for themselves, “paint” for themselves, who don’t necessarily have to see the words set down in order to understand the message.
Reading between the lines, connecting the dots. Austen already asks that much of her readers with the narrative voice she refined—nay, invented. There’s a constant, clever irony between what is said and what should be understood, a discrepancy that allows the reader to discover for themselves who her characters really are, and how that differs from how they’re seen by others or how they see themselves. In her correspondence with Richard Crosby, the publisher who shelved her first novel for years, she gives herself the name “Mrs. Ashton Dennis” so she can sign the letter with the acrostic “MAD.”
It’s not a stretch to think she wrote other thoughts in clear view, wanting only for readers with the ingenuity to see it. An ingenuity to match her own, for no dull elf was she.