“The affection of the whole family, the warm attachment of Miss Campbell in particular, was the more honourable to each party, from the circumstance of Jane’s decided superiority, both in beauty and acquirements.”
When Evelina is in great trouble, and the “best of men,” Mr. Villars, is penetrated to the heart by the sight of her grief, he can think of no better consolation than:
“My dearest child, I cannot bear to see thy tears; for my sake dry them: such a sight is too much for me: think of that, Evelina, and take comfort, I charge thee.”
With similar masculine futility the self-centred Edmund Bertram attempts to soften the grief of his dear cousin:
“No wonder—you must feel it—you must suffer. How a man who had once loved, could desert you. But yours—your regard was new compared with——Fanny, think of me.”
Many a reader, doubtless, has, with Elizabeth Bennet, “lifted up his eyes in amazement” at the platitudes of Mary on the occasion of Lydia’s elopement, without suspecting that offensive young moralist of having culled her phrases from the earlier novelist. “Remember, my dear Evelina,” writes Mr. Villars, “nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things.” Now Mary was “a great reader and made extracts.” She evidently studied the art of judicious quotation: “Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia,” says this astounding sister,
“we may draw from it this useful lesson: that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable—that one false step involves her in endless ruin—that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful, and that she cannot be too guarded in her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.”
The general resemblance of Catherine Morland’s situation to Evelina’s may have been unconscious, but was scarcely, we think, accidental. In Northanger Abbey, as in no other of Miss Austen’s novels, though in all Miss Burney’s, the heroine is detached from her ordinary surroundings and introduced to society under the inefficient protection of foolish acquaintances. Like Evelina, she finds in the great world much cause for alarm and anxiety, though, like her, she has the hero for partner at her first ball. She, too, is frequently tormented by the differences between her aristocratic and her vulgar friends. Henry Tilney’s attitude towards her, on the other hand, is very similar to Lord Orville’s towards Evelina. He can read her like an open book, and his discovery of her suspicions about his father is as ingenious and as delicately revealed as Orville’s generous chivalry to Evelina at the ridotto. Indeed, had Fanny Burney been more daring she would have confessed that Orville’s affection for Evelina, like Tilney’s for Catherine,
“originated in nothing better than gratitude; or in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.”
The admiration which Evelina expressed with so much naïveté and earnestness to her guardian must have betrayed itself in her looks and conversation. Orville’s heart was won by unconscious flattery, though Miss Burney herself was too conventional to admit it. She left the conception and its defence to another. “It is a new circumstance in romance,” writes Miss Austen, “and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.”