W hen she was about 16, Jane Austen wrote a comic epistolary novel called Lesley Castle. The heroine, cooking for her sister’s wedding, discovers “that I had been Roasting, Broiling and Stewing both the Meat and Myself to no purpose”, when her sister comes running in to say her fiancé has fractured his skull. “‘Good God!’ (said I) ‘you don’t say so? Why, what in the name of Heaven will become of all the Victuals?’”
Austen is funny about food, in both senses. As if this passage was a warning to her future self about its comic absurdity, she barely lets it pass the lips of her heroines in her mature novels. The lack of domestic detail in their lives allows them to soar above the material facts of the inevitable marriage, the acquisition of responsibility for a kitchen, and what Austen described wearily as “a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb”. References to food are, instead, artfully deployed in skewering and roasting her foolish or immoral characters. Her hints about Mrs Bennet’s family dinner, Mrs Dashwood’s “presents of fish and game, and so forth”, and Mr Woodhouse’s basin of gruel are never to their advantage.
Although her sympathetic characters might be too dignified to care about a ragout or a gooseberry tart, their world is not hermetically sealed. It is oxygenated by farming, by servants and cooks, by sugar plantations and by the embarrassment of the wrong sort of riches. Staying with their wealthy brother, Jane jokes to sister Cassandra about the luxury of drinking French wine, eating ice cream and being above “vulgar economy”. Money rattles throughout the novels and, because Georgian society was much closer to food production than ours, that “vulgar economy” is often about eating.
Austen delicately sets up Miss Bates’s genteel poverty in Emma through chat about gifts of pork and apples, so we understand that Emma’s offence at the picnic on Box Hill was to humiliate the reduced Miss Bates from a position of fortune and wealth. Perhaps Austen abandoned The Watsons because the heroine’s deprivations were too painfully close to her own. As Mary Crawford says in Mansfield Park, “A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,” because it secures the luxury of turkey and myrtle, a symbol of marriage. Most “large incomes” came from land: an aspiration Austen shares without ignoring its vexed moralities. Elinor Dashwood’s brother refuses an income for his sisters, but splurges on enclosing his land and buying out a neighbouring farmer. Yet heroes must have land; even those destined for the cloth measure their wealth by the “living” and the food that it might produce.
Scholars have pored over Fanny’s account of asking her Uncle Bertram about the slave trade of the West Indies, which was met by a dead silence from the family. Austen’s Georgian readers would understand that the wealth the Mansfield Park family believe elevates them above their poor little cousin, was likely to be tainted. Two decades earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft had explicitly linked sugar and slavery in her call for female equality. “Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them, when principles would be a surer guard only to sweeten the cup of man?”
When I wrote Dinner with Mr Darcy about food in Austen’s work, the correspondence was a joyous discovery for me. Those gossipy, intimate letters with witty anecdotes about put-downs at dinners, ball suppers, her mother’s skill in dairying and gardening, show a relish in the details of what the Austen family and friends were eating and how that food found its way on to the table. But it is her mature novels that have fuelled scholars and readers in the 250 years since her birth, because every slender mention is an amuse-bouche; an elegant, tiny thing that explodes with significance; the foretaste of an endlessly fascinating world-view.
Pen Vogler will be giving a talk, “Skewered and Roasted: Jane Austen as Culinary Critic”, on 2 August at the Holt Bookshop in Holt, Norfolk
[See also: Just raise tax]
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This article appears in the 02 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Just Raise Tax!