Jane Austen's Rogues

"A Small Hole in Fanny Price's Heart"

The year of our Lord 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth on December 16, 1775. I began 2025 by providing a list of ways to prepare young readers to meet dear Jane. It’s easy to think of Austen’s drawing-room world as safe compared to ours. Her characters never had to worry about being catfished on a dating app! Yet, the more I read Austen, the more I sense that she was fully aware of the dangers lurking for her sheltered female characters. In Austen’s literary world, authors were not shy about portraying rogues and their dark designs on young women. Austen communicates more obliquely about her villainous male characters.

Hugh Thomson’s header for chapter IV of Pride and Prejudice

Largely, Austen’s men are heroic, benign, or lacking any design on her young women. Austen’s books lack certain standbys of 18th and 19th century literature: the lecherous old lord, the cloak-and-dagger rogue, the brothel-frequenting brute.¹ This is why I find her genuine predators to be so chilling, because they stand out from the literary phalanx of Bingleys, Tilneys, and Knightleys. Instead of centering scheming male characters, Austen focuses on the young women who could be taken in by them, and how their seductions do not occur.

“A Small Hole in Fanny Price’s Heart”

In Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford and his sister Mary discuss how Henry will occupy his time: “And how do you think I mean to amuse myself, Mary, on the days that I do not hunt? I am grown too old to go out more than three times a week.”² Mary suggests that he walk and ride with her. Henry responds,

“…I shall be happy to do both, but that would be exercise only to my body, and I must take care of my mind. Besides, that would be all recreation and indulgence, without the wholesome alloy of labour, and I do not like to eat the bread of idleness. No, my plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me.”

“Fanny Price! Nonsense! No, no. You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins.”

“But I cannot be satisfied without Fanny Price, without making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart….I assure you she is quite a different creature from what she was in the autumn. She was then merely a quiet, modest, not plain-looking girl, but she is now absolutely pretty. I used to think she had neither complexion nor countenance; but in that soft skin of hers, so frequently tinged with a blush as it was yesterday, there is decided beauty; and from what I observed of her eyes and mouth, I do not despair of their being capable of expression enough when she has anything to express. And then, her air, her manner, her tout ensemble, is so indescribably improved! She must be grown two inches, at least, since October.”³

Hugh Thomson’s illustration for this scene in Mansfield Park

Henry intends to hunt animals, and to hunt Fanny Price. She is his intended quarry, and he sizes her up as prey.⁴ Fanny never likes Henry with great zeal at any point in Mansfield Park, and this excites Henry: “Her looks say, ‘I will not like you, I am determined not to like you’; and I say she shall.”⁵ While Henry has not the damning history of Wickham or Willoughby, Austen’s intimate view into Henry’s schemes makes him quite frightening. He wants to devote his time and labor to this project. He does not intend to propose marriage to her at this point: he wants “nothing more” than for her to “feel when I go away that she shall be never happy again.”⁶ Henry eventually follows his sister’s advice, running away with one of Fanny’s cousins—but it’s Maria Rushworth (née Bertram), the cousin who is already married. Afterward, Austen dispatches Maria to live in disgrace with her malignant Mrs. Norris.⁷

How, then, does Austen work out Maria’s downfall, the safety of her sister Julia, and the preservation of Fanny herself? Julia was not “flattered and spoilt” like her sister, and considered herself “a little inferior” to Maria. Mrs. Norris’s flattery and spoilage of Maria made her easy prey for Henry, whose attempt at charm could not win the steadfast Fanny. In Austen’s world, the blame for Maria’s moral downfall lies as squarely with Mrs. Norris as it does with Maria. All of Mrs. Norris’s attentions did not cultivate a woman who would make a wise marriage, or think highly of her vows. Austen punishes Mrs. Norris and Maria equally—with each other! Yet, Fanny’s preservation can only be attributed to herself. At some points, it seems like everyone in Mansfield Park wanted Fanny to end up with Henry, and only Fanny herself preserves her from Henry.

Austen’s impressionable young readers are not just warned away from raptorial suitors by their own wits and intuitions; Austen invites them to consider the influence of those around them. As we will see in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, it is not the young women alone who bear responsibility for their safety. There is a communal responsibility to protect young women, and Austen’s heroines are endangered as much by the neglect of their families and friends as they are by the designs of wicked men.

Fanny knows what Price her heart is, and not any hunter cannot succeed in making “a small hole” in it. In the final chapter of Mansfield Park, Austen says, “[Fanny] was safe from Mr. Crawford.”⁸ Henry, however, Austen leaves wretched in the friendless wreck of his life.⁹ In Mansfield Park, Austen shows that young women must stand up for themselves when no one else will, but also that harmful influences can have disastrous consequences on one’s character.

“One Looked White, the Other Red”

When George Wickham and Fitzwilliam Darcy meet in Meryton, Elizabeth notices how they react to seeing each other: “Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.”¹⁰

Austen leaves it up to her readers to decide who was white and who was red. I interpret Wickham’s response to Darcy as fear, the blood draining from his face. He avoids Darcy, and quickly begins spinning his web of lies soon after this meeting. Darcy, in my view, grows red in the face at the sight of Wickham, still angry about Wickham’s attempted seduction of Georgiana. If the issue between them really was about financial support, as Wickham would have Elizabeth believe, Wickham would have been angry, but Darcy, holding both money and power, caring not for his own reputation, would have no reason to be afraid of Wickham.

Austen does not hold Georgiana culpable for Wickham’s near seduction. Austen even provides Mrs. Younge to prove that Wickham needed the help of a seemingly respectable woman to whisk away Georgiana. They did not dare to take Georgiana from her home at Pemberley, but from her London living to Ramsgate, where Mrs. Younge had intended for her to meet Wickham.¹¹

It’s not Georgiana, but the Bennet sisters, who are endangered in Pride and Prejudice. A facile reading might place the culpability all with Wickham and Lydia, but a close reading shows that more factors are at play.

Like Maria in Mansfield Park, Lydia is silly, spoilt, flattered by her mother and ignored by her father, made easy prey for male attention. The Bennets are not exempt from Austen’s critical eye here. Yet, the situation could have been avoided if one man had acted differently. Not Wickham, for his role could be filled by any varmint, but Darcy. When Darcy happens upon Elizabeth just after she hears of Lydia running away, Elizabeth bears responsibility:

“When I consider,” she added, in a yet more agitated voice, “that I might have prevented it! I who knew what he was. Had I but explained some part of it only—some part of what I learnt, to my own family! Had his character been known, this could not have happened. But it is all, all too late now….When my eyes were opened to his real character, oh! had I known what I ought, what I dared to do! But I knew not—I was afraid of doing too much. Wretched, wretched mistake!”¹²

As a reader, I find it unlikely that Elizabeth’s cautions would have prevented Lydia from going to Brighton and running away with Wickham. Elizabeth had tried and failed to warn her family in general terms, so why would they have listened to specifics, especially from a source such as Darcy?¹³ Such a reading gives too much credit to Mr. Bennet, who is more interested in not being annoyed than doing right by his daughters, and to Lydia, who hears what she wants to hear. Excepting Elizabeth, none of the Bennets had reason to trust Darcy over Wickham, and even by the end of the book they doubt his affections for Elizabeth.

Elizabeth weighing Darcy’s letter. Hugh Thomson’s illustration for Pride and Prejudice.

Instead, the character who bears responsibility for Wickham running loose in society is Darcy. The way he protected his sister’s reputation imperiled young women like Lydia, to whom he gave little to no thought.¹⁴ The reason Darcy wrote a letter to Elizabeth containing the truth about Wickham was for Darcy to clear his own name to her, not because he was interested in warning the Bennet daughters away from Wickham. If he had a general concern for young women, he could have warned Mr. Bennet or the Forsters about Wickham, or even spread dark hints about Wickham’s character to other men. Georgiana’s name need not be mentioned at all.

If not for Elizabeth, it would have been enough for Darcy to protect his sister, and never think about the other women Wickham might threaten. When Darcy’s heart opens to Elizabeth, he sees how his actions impact more than his own family. He develops a conscience that looks “not to your own interests but to the interests of others.”¹⁵ Darcy’s extreme actions to find Lydia and marry her to Wickham come from his guilt when he realizes that he has allowed a predator to roam free.

Unlike some of Austen’s other heroes, Fitzwilliam Darcy must undergo a profound change of character to become marriageable. He is “humbled”¹⁶ by the end of the novel, and I think it is the change in the hero as well as the heroine that has made Pride and Prejudice such good reading for 200 years.

Love is not just Elizabeth and Darcy’s attraction to one another, but a virtue: love makes them better people. Both Elizabeth and Darcy have to work on their own virtues to develop a mutually beneficial relationship, and that is what makes their story so delightful. I like to imagine that, under Elizabeth’s hand, the shades of Pemberley offer shelter to all young women as a rule, not just Georgiana.

“Would He Have Been….Less Happy?”

Readers first meet John Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility when he is hunting.¹⁷ He carries Marianne Dashwood and her sprained ankle home through the rain and wind, a chivalrous act if ever there was one. With Sir John’s hearty endorsement, “As good a kind of fellow as ever lived,” Marianne gives herself to explore Willoughby’s “pursuits, his talents, and genius,”¹⁸ though Sir John can only endorse his hunting prowess.¹⁹ Sir John even uses hunting language to endorse the pursuit of Willoughby as a husband: “he is very well worth catching I can tell you, Miss Dashwood.”²⁰

It is not long before Willoughby is indeed caught, not for marriage by a Dashwood sister, but in his sins by Colonel Brandon. Brandon is summoned from their party to Whitwell, and mocked by Marianne and Willoughby for leaving promptly. Later, Brandon tells Elinor that he had finally received news of his ward, who at sixteen was seduced by Willoughby:

Little did Mr. Willoughby imagine, I suppose, when his looks censured me for incivility in breaking up the party, that I was called away to the relief of one whom he had made poor and miserable; but had he known it, what would it have availed? Would he have been less gay or less happy in the smiles of your sister? No, he had already done that, which no man who can feel for another would do. He had left the girl whose youth and innocence he had seduced, in a situation of the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no help, no friends, ignorant of his address! He had left her, promising to return; he neither returned, nor wrote, nor relieved her.²¹

Is this not the very pattern of how Willoughby treats Marianne, even though he does not seduce her? Willoughby sees women as objects to be used for his pleasure. The young Eliza²² he lures from safety and exploits with no regard for her well-being; Marianne, he manipulates for emotional and social pleasure before abandoning; Miss Grey, he marries for her wealth after his disinheritance.

Willoughby cuts a lock of Marianne’s hair before abandoning her. Hugh Thomson’s illustration in Sense and Sensibility.

Brandon telling the truth about Willoughby is what Darcy could have done with Wickham. But Darcy failed until he was offered a second chance. Brandon stood up for what was right at the first chance, perhaps learning from his past mistakes about the public consequences of secret relationships.²³ In Sense and Sensibility, we see a community stand up for what is right, in retribution for Eliza. If Miss Grey knows the reason for Willoughby’s disinheritance, it says much about her morals that she marries him anyway.

Edward Ferrars also gives readers an idea of how to act uprightly in a similar situation. As a young adolescent, Edward had thought himself in love with Lucy Steele. Despite his access to her, he refrains from seducing her, even standing by his word once his feelings have changed. He does not even burden Elinor with the weight of his secret, though Lucy does.²⁴ While modern readers might find Edward untrustworthy because he did not tell Elinor about his engagement, Elinor disagrees. She interprets his integrity an endorsement of his character. Edward shows us that Austen finds men capable of controlling themselves and acting chivalrously to women, even the youngest and most vulnerable.

Conclusion

Each of Austen’s heroines, in her own way, shows that her particular upbringing and the quality of adults around her affect her life choices and her marital opportunities. Lydia had no Colonel Brandon looking out for her; Fanny did not have a Darcy drop from the skies. As

Christina Bieber Lake

recently wrote at Art and Soul, “One of the primary themes of all of Austen’s novels is that character formation involves learning how to know who to trust.” Unlike their handsomeness, cleverness, or wealth, Austen’s young women are not granted this discernment at birth. They learn from experience, from family, from society, perhaps even novels.

Austen has high standards for her heroes, and the ones who fail she leaves “wretched.” She holds her rogues fully responsible for their own actions. Complicit women like Lydia and Maria Bertram Rushworth are few and far between, while more Austen novels have a rogue²⁵, and all have undesirable men. Yet, Austen also holds the societies surrounding her heroines responsible for their protection and happiness. Willoughby’s disinheritance and Henry’s “wretchedness” show what she deems appropriate for men who seduce.

Two hundred and fifty years on, the world Austen was born into has disappeared. Human nature, however, remains the same. Problems of prudence and attachment still plague us. By examining Austen’s rogues, we can learn to stand up for our consciences, like Fanny Price. We can choose to become better people and rectify past mistakes, like Darcy and Elizabeth. We can do the right thing in the first place, like Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars. Even if we no longer live in the drawing rooms of Austen’s imagination, we can do right by one another.

“‘It is only a novel!’ ….or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter V

1. Unless, of course, you are Catherine Morland, in which case your interpersonal hermeneutic needs some work.

2. Mansfield Park, chapter XXIV. Emphasis mine.

3. Ibid.

4. Deirdre Lynch connects this conversation to Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Laisons dangereuses: “Henry’s plot to put a small hole in Fanny’s heart may represent an anglicized version of the schemes of Laclos’s libertine hero, the Vicomte de Valmont.” Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition, ed. Deirdre Shauna Lynch, Harvard Belknap Press, 266.

5. Mansfield Park, chapter XXIV.

6. Ibid.

7. “It ended in Mrs. Norris’s resolving to quit Mansfield and devote herself to her unfortunate Maria, and in an establishment being formed for them in another country, remote and private, where, shut up together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other no judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment.” Mansfield Park, chapter XLVIII.

8. Mansfield Park, chapter XLVIII.

9. “…we may fairly consider a man of sense, like Henry Crawford, to be providing for himself no small portion of vexation and regret: vexation that must rise sometimes to self-reproach, and regret to wretchedness, in having so requited hospitality, so injured family peace, so forfeited his best, most estimable, and endeared acquaintance, and so lost the woman whom he had rationally as well as passionately loved.” Mansfield Park, chapter XLVIII.

10. Pride and Prejudice, chapter XV.

11. “About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with the lady who presided over it to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by design; for there proved to have been a prior acquaintance between him and Mrs. Younge, in whose character we were most unhappily deceived; and by her connivance and aid he so far recommended himself to Georgiana, whose affectionate heart retained a strong impression of his kindness to her as a child, that she was persuaded to believe herself in love and to consent to an elopement.” Pride and Prejudice, chapter XXXV.

12. Pride and Prejudice, chapter XLVI. Emphasis mine.

13. Patricia Meyer Spacks annotates Darcy’s letter: “Darcy’s allusion to the general view of Elizabeth and Jane may remind us that community opinion, in Austen’s world, affects everyone….Despite Elizabeth Bennet’s independent spirit, she is both influenced by the views of her community and concerned about them inasmuch as they bear on her.” Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Harvard Belknap Press, 239.

14. “I was spoiled by my parents, who, though good themselves…allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.” Pride and Prejudice, chapter LVIII.

15. Philippians 2:4 NRSVUE.

16. “What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” Pride and Prejudice, chapter LVIII.

17. “A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him, was passing up the hill and within a few yards of Marianne, when her accident happened. He put down his gun and ran to her assistance.” Sense and Sensibility, chapter IX. We don’t learn his name until a few paragraphs later, from Sir John. Patricia Meyer Spacks notes that the pointers would have been used to track woodland birds that Willoughby shot. Sense and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Harvard Belknap Press, 84.

18. Sense and Sensibility, chapter IX.

19. “A very decent shot, and there is not a bolder rider in England….he is a pleasant, good humoured fellow, and has got the nicest little black bitch of a pointer I ever saw.” Ibid.

20. Ibid. Note that Miss Dashwood is Elinor, and Sir John, in a rather thoughtless joke, encourages competition between the sisters over Willoughby.

21. Sense and Sensibility, chapter XXXI. Emphasis mine.

22. I highly recommend Christina Morland’s The Year in Between (2021) for an imagining of Eliza’s life after Willoughby. The novel is set during chapter L of Sense and Sensibility, when Marianne’s feelings change over the course of a year (a few paragraphs to the reader).

23. “We were within a few hours of eloping together for Scotland. The treachery, or the folly, of my cousin’s maid betrayed us.” Sense and Sensibility, chapter XXXI.

24. Some of the adaptations of Sense and Sensibility indicate that Edward intends to tell Elinor about Lucy at Norland, but this intention is not present in the novel.

25. I do count William Elliot from Persuasion as a rogue, but his roguishness is more complex than any of the others’.