Reading body language: a game of skill. (Conference Papers).

McMaster, Juliet

"I OBSERVED MY FRIEND'S BEHAVIOUR attentively," writes Darcy in his letter to Elizabeth; "and I could then perceive that his partiality for Miss Bennet was beyond what I had ever witnessed in him. Your sister I also watched. -- Her look and manners were open, cheerful and engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar regard" (PP 197). Darcy is like a scholar, attentively observing signs, checking sources, arriving at a conclusion on the basis of the best available evidence, and taking action accordingly. When he is accused of having come to a mistaken conclusion and therefore acting wrongly on it, he still defends himself: "I shall not scruple to assert, that the serenity of your sister's countenance and air was such, as might have given the most acute observer, a conviction that, however amiable her temper, her heart was not likely to be easily touched" (197).

Where does he get this notion that one may read body language as though it were a written contract, as legible and reliable as a legal document?

Darcy--and Jane Austen through him -- is drawing on a body of doctrine thoroughly familiar to eighteenth-century novelists, as well as to artists and actors, and accepted virtually as scientific fact for decades. We have all learned to pay attention to minute signs in her novels, and to recognize and interpret, as her characters do, the significance of blushes, sighs, smiles, downcast eyes, and glowing looks in her novels. But some exploration of the scholarship on the subject that was common knowledge in her day can enhance our appreciation of the subtlety with which she uses such a body of doctrine.

The multitude of different motions that we lump together and call "body language" today were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries minutely discriminated and deeply studied. And before I return to Austen's novels I want to give you a swift run-down of that scholarship.

To begin with, what is the body, and how does it work?

A major text on this subject was Descartes' The Passions of the Soul of 1649. Descartes largely displaced the classical view of the body as made up of the four humours with a model of the body as a machine, like "a watch or other automaton" (Descartes 21). It is a highly materialist vision. The soul is not an abstraction beyond the body, but firmly located in a part of the brain, near the eyes. What the eye perceives, says Descartes, the soul communicates through the nerves to the limbs; and the limbs will respond by a suitable "Action." For instance, if a large threatening animal approaches you, your eye perceives, and your soul responds with the passion of fear; then it sends its message; and your legs proceed to run away, or your arms to snatch a weapon, according to your will and temperament. This all sounds crude enough; but then so are most models; and each is capable of refinement and elaboration. The principle from Descartes that we need to remember is "that what is Passion [or emotion] in [the soul] is commonly an Action in the [body]" (19). I shall be using the word "Action" in this special sense, as an almost knee-jerk reaction to some identifiable emotional stimulus. Stimulus results automatically in Action. Steam pushes piston, piston turns wheel--to use an anachronistic analogy.

Descartes's view of the body was eagerly taken up by the medical profession both on the continent and in England, and you find one physician after another writing of the body as a machine. (1) Doctors and scientists were writing of actual bodies as they saw them. But the subject develops an extra dimension when professional actors and painters take over the theory, with a view to representing emotions on the stage or in painting.

Actors latched on to the concept that every passion has its appropriate Action. Garrick, in particular, was famous for his Actions. This is his description, for instance, on how to enact Macbeth:

When the Murder of Duncan is committed, from an immediate Consciousness of the Fact, his Ambition is ingulph'd at that Instant, by the Horror of the Deed; . . . he should at that Time, be a moving Statue, or indeed a petrifi'd Man; his Eyes must Speak, and his Tongue be metaphorically silent.... His Attitudes must be quick and permanent.... The Murderer should be seen in every Limb...:This is the Picture of a compleat Regicide. (Garrick 8-9)

Notice his insistence on this performance as a "Picture": for Garrick, the visual part of a performance seems to have been more important than the verbal. Moreover, in this representation of Horror, the whole body--"every limb"--must be enlisted. Garrick once gave a comedian who had to act drunk this qualified praise: "You have acted the part of a drunkard with much fidelity;... but permit me to make one slight critique--your left leg was too sober" (Siddons 185).

In Jane Austen's own time an authority on gesture, Gilbert Austin, was still emphasising the primary importance of these bodily motions: "All the strong passions of the mind do indeed communicate themselves so suddenly and irresistibly to the body, that vehement gesticulations can hardly be avoided and these are no doubt natural. Thus anger threatens, affright starts, joy laughs and dances" (Austin 137-88). The great advantage of this language of gesture, the authorities were quick to emphasise, is that it is natural and universal. Hence, first, it doesn't lie--or at least it lies less easily than words. And second, it is readily understood by all nations, for "it had the happiness to escape the curse at the confusion of Babel" (Bulwer 19). "The natural signs of emotions," writes Lord Kames authoritatively, "being nearly the same in all men, form an universal language, which no difference of place, no difference of tribe, no diversity of tongue, can darken or render doubtful" (Home II 127).

Given all this enthusiasm for the language of gesture as natural, universal, and true, it's not surprising that Actions, or significant gestures, were considered hugely important on the stage. Indeed, by the end of the century the concept was ripe for parody, as in Sheridan's The Critic of 1779. Here a stage direction reads: "BURLEIGH comes forward, shakes his head, and exit." And a critic asks the director:

SNEER: His is very perfect indeed--Now, pray what did he mean by that?

PUFF: You don't take it?

SNEER: No; I don't upon my soul.

PUFF: Why, by that shake of the head, he gave you to understand that even tho' they had more justice in their cause and wisdom in their measures--yet, if there was not a greater spirit shown on the part of the people--the country would at last fall a sacrifice to the hostile ambition of the Spanish monarchy. SNEER: The devil!--Did he mean all that by shaking his head? PUFF: Every word of it--If he shook his head as I taught him. (III.i)

No wonder scholars were developing dictionaries of gesture!

"Significant gestures appear thus to be the great ornaments of dramatic exhibition," wrote Gilbert Austin, "and it must be admitted that the performance will be the most brilliant in which they abound the most" (496). One understands that acting was a very busy activity in the eighteenth century. For some, no doubt, too busy. A "poor player" in The Vicar of Wakefield complains that "it is not the composition of the piece, but the number of starts and attitudes that may be introduced into it, that elicits applause" (103).

But it's time to come back to Jane Austen. Where does she fit in among all these theories and conventions?

She was early a parodist of codified stage gesture. In Love and Freindship the heroines of sensibility are much given to fainting and weepmg. And some improbable turns of plot come with Actions performed strictly by the book. For instance: According to Henry Siddons, son of the famous actress: "A man generally starts back from a fearful idea.... The same thing happens in astonishment whilst surprising and incredible ideas take possession of the soul" (Siddons 111). "TO THROW UP THE HANDS TO HEAVEN," writes Bulwer, in a dictionary of gesture, "is an expression of admiration, amazement, and astonishment" (Bulwer 33). Accordingly, in Love and Freindship, on discovering the third long-lost grandchild in so many minutes, "Lord St. Clair started, and retreating back a few paces, with uplifted Hands, said 'Another Grand-child!'" (MW 91). Young Jane has recognized an outworn convention, and she sends it up.

But occasionally Austen does take these physical manifestations seriously, and employ them in her novels. In the dramatically heightened scene of Willoughby's unexpected interview with Elinor at the end of Sense and Sensibility, Austen as narrator might well have taken instruction from Garrick as actor. (2) The chapter begins:

Elinor, starting back with a look of horror at the sight of him, obeyed the first impulse of her heart in turning instantly to quit the room, and her hand was already on the lock when its action was suspended by his hastily advancing....(SS 317)

There is the classic start back in horror, the view of the body as reacting to emotional stimulus (she "obeyed the first impulse of her heart"), and even the deployment of the term "action" almost in its technical sense. And the scene goes on in this heightened vein, with frequent abstract nouns for the various emotions, and full reference to their bodily manifestations. I extract the phrases:

a voice rather of command than supplication . . . replied with firmness . . . cried with vehemence . . . the utmost amazement . . . an attitude of deep meditation . . . a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks . . . looked at him with greater astonishment . . . an expressive smile . . . Elinor bowed her assent turning her eyes on him with the most angry contempt looking at her with an heightened colour and an enquiring eye . . . colouring likewise . . . an heavy sigh. . . . He held out his hand. She could not refuse to give him her's;--he pressed it with affection . . . And with these words, he almost ran out of the room. (SS 371-32)

You see how the carefully registered bodily motions, separated from the dialogue, nevertheless provide a vivid and visible summary of the changing emotions of the two participants in this scene. And the signs get fewer, and spaced more widely, towards the end of the scene, as the passions are vented and the antagonists reach a stage of reflection and relative calm. Jane Austen has done it well, as she does everything well; but this is not her characteristic mode, at least not in the degree of emphasis on these passions and these actions. Some of the dialogue, too, is uncharacteristically heightened: "'God be praised! . . . For God's sake . . . Upon my soul it is . . . the violence of her passions . . . Oh! How infinitely superior!"' (318-22) These fragments, at least, are stage lingo. But of course the speeches in between are less stagy and more nuanced. And Willoughby himself, for all his deployment of the stage conventions, occasionally shows an awareness of his own theatricality. "'Thunderbolts and daggers !--what a reproof she [Marianne] would have given me!"' (325).

Such self-consciousness in a character marks even more awareness in the author. Austen was making an experiment in high rhetoric, but her heart, or rather her head, wasn't really in it. She makes the most of Willoughby's rhetorical skill, however, in his gestures as in his language. And she allows us to speculate whether his command of theatrical performance is not part of his villainy as well as part of his charm. It is characters like Richardson's Lovelace, (3) Austen's Willoughby, Wickham, and William Elliot who are the more dangerous for their capacity to bring the so-called involuntary bodily motions under control of their wills. For them the supposedly trustworthy and universal language of gesture can be just another way of lying.

It was not only the actors who made it their business to represent emotion. The painters were on the job too. In France at the end of the seventeenth century Charles Le Brun, first painter to Louis XIV, wrote an enormously influential little book called A Method to Learn to Design the Passions. It was a manual to instruct painters of historical subjects how to make their characters' emotions visible on their canvases. Le Brun too takes Descartes's Passions of the Soul as his authority; but he specializes: "We may conclude that the Face is the Part of the Body where the Passions more particularly discover themselves" (20). He provides vivid illustrations, or rather diagrams, on how the various passions are manifested in the face: Tranquility, Astonishment, Admiration, and so on. (See Figure 1.) Again, the model is crude; but again, it is capable of refinement. And eighteenth-century painters such as Reynolds and Hogarth pay respectful homage to Le Brun as to Descartes and the authorities on acting. Hogarth has a painting and engraving of Garrick playing Richard III, at the moment when Richard, in his nightmare before Bosworth field, is cursed by the ghosts of all those he has murdered. (See Figure 2.) You will see that Garrick, and Hogarth too, are rendering a passion between "Horrour" and "Fright" as Le Brun describes them:

[In Horrour] the Mouth will be half open. ... The face will appear of a pale colour; the Lips and Eyes a little upon the livid (30) ... the Hands quite open, and the Fingers separated wide from each other.... [In] Fright...the Arms will be upon the full stretch forward; the Legs in an Action of running away with all their strength; and All the parts of the Body in the utmost disorder. (48-49)

You see, then, how seriously the eighteenth century took these conventions about the visible manifestation of emotion. According to all the authorities, the properly educated person should be able to tell by close observation what is going on in the minds of those he observes.

And at the time a large part of the literate population was so educated. Following the English victory at Quebec on the Plains of Abraham, a crowd gathered to admire Benjamin West's painting of "The Death of General Wolfe," and Garrick was among them. Someone in the crowd objected that Wolfe's languishing pose did not conform to the account of his transient look of joy on hearing the news of the English victory. But Garrick at once adopted Wolfe's pose, and then, by one of the swift "transitions" for which he was famous, changed his expression from the deathly to the rapturous; whereupon the crowd burst out in applause (McKenzie 1). (4)

Clearly, that is an audience highly schooled in these manifestations. And Jane Austen was, too; but as an experienced and discriminating playgoer, (5) as well as a novelist, she eschewed over-statement, and deployed these physical signs with finesse.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, then, and well into the nineteenth, reading the passions through the body was a recognized pursuit. Indeed, it was a recognized discipline, with its own scholarship and professional practitioners. An intelligent person of Jane Austen's day, as she shows us, could no more dispense with this skill than with literacy, speech, conversation, or other more generally recognized modes of communication.

Reading the signs of love is particularly important, but particularly difficult, since according to a different set of conventions a woman is meant to conceal hers. Darcy, in his attentive reading of Jane Bennet, fails to take account of this different convention. You will remember that Elizabeth, though she can see that Jane "was in a way to be very much in love," is rather pleased that "it was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane united with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and a uniform cheerfulness of manner, which would guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent" (PP 21). Charlotte Lucas thinks Jane should make her feelings more visible; and Charlotte turns out to be right.

Thus Darcy is provided with some excuse for his misreading. According to all the authorities he takes account of, the ones that insist that a passion of the mind is automatically registered in the body, he should be right.

It's notable that we as readers are encouraged to judge Jane Austen's characters for their powers of observation and detection, as well as for their integrity or their powers of speech. Catherine Morland is a naive reader of bodies as well as books: she admires Isabella's facility in discovering "a flirtation between any gentleman and lady who only smiled at each other" (NA 33), without doubting its accuracy. Elinor can read better than Marianne--discovering, for instance, that "though [Colonel Brandon's] face was not handsome his countenance was sensible" (SS 34). Elizabeth, at least partly on grounds of looks, grossly misjudges both Wickham and Darcy, and has to learn that "'one has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it'" (PP 225). Fanny is an acute observer of such signs as Maria Bertram's "eyes . . . sparkling with pleasure" when Henry Crawford is near (MP 117), while Edmund is almost deliberately blind to them (116). Emma, of course, is an avid reader of body language, and takes de liberate note of Mr. Elton's sighs, or Frank Churchill's "looking intently across the room at Miss Fairfax" (E 222); but of course she disastrously misreads; whereas Mr. Knightley notes and correctly interprets "certain expressive looks" ($50) and "the blush on Jane's cheek" (E $48) as "symptoms of attachment" between her and Frank Churchill (350).

But it is Anne Elliot, I think, who is the most astute reader of bodies, and also whose body is most intricately legible. We are told early on that she has "a great deal of quiet observation" (P $4). Like Fanny in Mansfield Park, for much of Persuasion Anne is a character relegated to the sidelines, a spectator who can see more of the game than the players. And from that position she can observe and read the state of play between a number of couples: her father and Mrs. Clay, Elizabeth and Mr. Elliot, Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay, Wentworth, Louisa, and Henrietta, Henrietta and Charles Hayter. With all these potential matches, she has plenty to observe in the way of body talk.

Austen's preference, of course, is for the subtleties of that language, the passing facial expressions and eye movements, rather than the large gestures which by now have become hackneyed by over-use on the stage. It is Mrs. Clay who goes in for those. For instance, when Elizabeth affects to believe that Mr. Elliot's attentions to her are not particular,

"My dear Miss Elliot!" exclaimed Mrs. Clay, lifting up her hands and eyes, and sinking all the rest of her astonishment in a convenient silence. (213)

Anne notes the display with irony, and "admired the good acting of the friend" (213). Such thread-bare gestures are for the stage, not the intricate and nuanced relationships that she is equipped to observe.

Because she watches passing signs, rather than the stable features of beauty that Elizabeth considers all-important, she can study the unfolding of an emotion or a relationship, as with the difficult foursome of the two Musgrove girls, Louisa and Henrietta, and the men paying them attention. As an outsider in the love game, Anne makes an occupation of "watching the loves and jealousies of the four" (80). And her "opportunities of making her observations" (82) enable her to come to an educated conclusion, finely discriminated on the basis of visible evidence: Captain Wentworth was not in love with either. They were more in love with him; yet there it was not love. It was a little fever of admiration; but it might, probably must, end in love with some. (82)

Anne is like Darcy, closely watching signs and making judgements. But there's nothing she can do about what she sees. And to emphasise Anne's skill in accurate reading, we have the contrast of Mary's gross misreading, which is based not on an objective assessment of the signs, but on her own wishes. Mary claims triumphantly that Henrietta "took hardly any notice of Charles Hayter yesterday. ... [A]s to Captain Wentworth's liking Louisa as well as Henrietta, it is nonsense to say so; for he certainly does like Henrietta a great deal the best" (77).

William Elliot and his susceptibility is another object of Anne's educated scrutiny. She watches him with Elizabeth, and also tracks the looks between Elizabeth and Mrs. Clay that signal Elizabeth's belief that he is courting her (132). He] is himself an excellent reader of other bodies--for instance, like Anne he can deduce Sir Walter's danger from Mrs. Clay. And his skill in the game also makes him good at delivering signals. His look of "earnest admiration" at Lyme is immediately visible, not only to Anne as its object, but also to Wentworth, who intercepts it (104). And as in the scene in the shop in Bath, he goes in for display and busy activity. Still, he is devious, and the signals he delivers are deliberate, and not of the involuntary category. He has to be a good manager of his own body language, because of the triple game he is playing. Even the self-satisfied Mr. Elton of Emma (as the narrator tells us) looks a little awkward in the company of Mrs. Elton, Emma, and Harriet-"the woman he had just ma rried, the woman he had wanted to marry, and the woman he had been expected to marry" (E 271). But Mr. Elliot, "attending his two cousins and Mrs. Clay," never loses his cool, even though they are the woman he is expected to marry, the woman he wants to marry, and the woman he may have to marry. His body language is always under control, and that's one of his most sinister attributes.

"We are great watchers of each other's eyes," writes Lovelace in Clarissa, where many of the hundreds of pages are devoted to the minutiae of body language (Richardson 460). The same could be said of Anne and Wentworth, who involuntarily watch each other's eye movements before they are ready to talk to each other. "The lingo of the eyes," as Fielding called it, is a language we can't afford to miss in Persuasion. In other novels we learn most about the central love relationship through what the principals say to each other. Here, since a "perpetual estrangement" is in operation between them, we must watch for other signs. We know that Anne is constantly observing and interpreting Wentworth. When they first meet again after their broken engagement, "her eye half met Captain Wentworth's; a bow, a curtsey passed"--and at once Anne is asking herself, "Now, how were his sentiments to be read?" (59-60).

As we who read and re-read Jane Austen have learned, a good book is more richly significant the better we know it. And so it is with Wentworth for Anne. Because of her once-intimate knowledge of him, she can read his expressions like no one else. One might say that though she has a Ph.D. in body language in general, she specializes in Wentworth. Fortunately--unlike William Elliot--he is intricately legible. When he speaks of "the year six," when they were engaged, "Anne felt the impossibility, from her knowledge of his mind, that he could be unvisited by remembrance" (63). When he listens to the "fat sighings" of Mrs. Musgrove, "a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth, ... convinced Anne" that he had not shared the mother's tenderness for poor Richard" (67). Similarly, when Mary produces some of her snobbery on the Hayter family, Anne "perfectly kn[ows] the meaning" of "an artificial, assenting smile, followed by a contemptuous glance, as he turned away" (86).

Although she is constantly watching his eye motions--"his glowing, manly, open look" (61), "His bright, proud eye" (62), the "glance of his bright eye" (67)--the looks she observes are initially only for other people, not herself. Full eye contact is never established in the Uppercross phase of their relation. The "half" meeting of their eyes at their first encounter is as close as they get (59). Thereafter he treats her with "cold politeness ... ceremonious grace" (92). No eye contact there. But William Elliot's look of "earnest admiration" in Lyme surprises Wentworth into a reassessment of her "wretchedly altered" appearance:

He gave her a momentary glance,--a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, "That man is struck with you,--and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again." (104)

That's a lot for a momentary glance to say! But like the actor in Sheridan's The Critic, Wentworth has to be a master of Actions and facial expressions, and able to deliver speaking looks successfully. This speaking look even has dialogue assigned to it.

Although we hear most about Anne's readings of Wentworth, because we are in Anne's consciousness and not his, we learn enough to deduce that Wentworth, too, is sometimes observing her. "Once she felt that he was looking at herself--observing her altered features, perhaps trying to trace in them the ruins of the face that once charmed him" (72). (6) This is intricate indeed: Anne is reading him reading her. And such a sentence speaks to her snail-horn sensitivity: even when she isn't looking at him, she can feel his eyes on her, as though his glance were a beam or a ray.

The history of this central relation continues to be epitomised in eye movements. Its new phase in Lyme is signalled again when Wentworth appeals to Anne to stay with Louisa, "turning to her and speaking with a glow, and yet a gentleness, which seemed almost restoring the past" (114). Notice the tentativeness in the "seemed" and the "almost." One part of the appeal of this visible but non-verbal language is that it is suggestive rather than crudely declarative. It leaves room for speculation, interpretation. In some senses it is the poetry of communication, conveyed expressively but economically by image, rhythm, motion, while speech is the prose.

The meetings in Bath continue "almost restoring the past." But there is still not the full and open mutual look that will restore them to each other; and now it is Wentworth who is pained to watch her suitors. On his arrival, she sees him first: "her start was perceptible only to herself," we hear (176). All along Anne has had to keep her own body language under control, suppressed and invisible; and what she can't suppress still goes unnoticed, since hitherto no one has been watching her. Now she feels "all the overpowering, blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise"; but she has time to prepare her face to meet him. He, on the other hand, was more obviously struck and confused by the sight of her, than she had ever observed before; he looked quite red" (175). She is still reading him, and reading him closely. But the obliqueness of vision, the necessity for watching each other alternately rather than mutually, still haunts their communication. In a conversation at the concert, his eyes are "ha lf averted," his glance "more than half expressive" (185). And when she looks in his direction, "as her eyes fell on him his seemed to be withdrawn from her" (188). When she learns he never loved Louisa, she shows the classic signs of happiness--"Her eyes were bright, her cheeks glowed" (185)--but he is not by to see them. And when she mentions her agreeable impressions of Lyme, he evidently misinterprets her "faint blush" (184) as registering a memory of William Elliot's look of "earnest admiration."

But the time is coming for full, shared, mutual eye contact, and the renewed and trusting relation it signals. At the gathering with the Musgroves at the White Hart, when he hears a conversation about parents' preventing long engagements, Wentworth is ready to share his sensitivity on the subject with Anne: "He turned round the next instant to give a look--one quick, conscious look at her" (231). And presently he is writing his impassioned letter: "A word, a look," he tells her, "will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening, or never" (238).

That's quite a burden for a word or a look to carry! In the event, when he approaches her in Union-street, Anne opts for the look rather than the word:

He joined them; but, as if irresolute whether to join them or to pass on, said nothing--only looked. Anne could command herself enough to receive that look, and not repulsively. [There's an understatement for you!] The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side. (239-40)

It is fitting that a relation so haunted by alienation--by speeches overheard and intentions misunderstood--should be resolved at last by eyes and cheeks and motions rather than words. In a narrative where the lovers are inflicted, as they believe, with "perpetual estrangement" (64), it is the bodies and hearts that must come together before the minds can meet with words. The "passions of the mind" may not have eventuated in the mechanical "action" that anatomists, painters, and actors had analysed; but Austen has indeed taken on and refined the theories of the interconnection of mind and body, and made a language of them that at its best is more communicative than speech.

In her glances and blushes and glows and starts, Anne as the principal in her own love affair is interestingly legible to us as readers: reading her is our passion, our pursuit, our pleasure. But Anne herself is a skilled reader of such signs in others. In spite of her initially isolated and forlorn state, she derives occupation and "amusement" from her study of the bodily signs of others. She is educated in the discipline; and she can educate us, too, as we follow her perceptions.

According to the tradition Jane Austen inherited, the best body was the one most richly legible, the best art that in which the figures are most fully expressive. She accepted these principles, I think, while subtly refining the practice. To read her characters as they read other bodies in the context of the discourses of passion, Action, and expression I have outlined, is to appreciate again how much she can do with the traditions she inherits. Her immediate audience was well educated in these discourses; and it's worth our knowing some of what was so familiar to them. For Jane Austen does not write for such dull elves As know not a great deal of body lingo themselves. (7)

NOTES

(1.) For instance, Richard Mead, George Cheyne, and the French physician La Mettrie, who wrote a book called L'homme machine (1748).

(2.) I am indebted to Judith Fisher, who explored this subject in a course with me on the eighteenth-century novel, and published the result in Persuasions.

(3.) I have explored the body language in Clarissa, and Lovelace's developed ability to manage his own physical reactions, in an article.

(4.) I first read this anecdote in Alan T. McKenzie's Certain, Lively Episodes.

(5.) Penny Gay's book on Jane Austen and theatre, soon to emerge from Cambridge University Press, provides impressive information on Austen as an experienced and discerning play-goer.

(6.) The Oxford text, I confess, has a comma after "perhaps": but I am convinced it was erroneously added by a compositor, so for the nonce I take the liberty of removing it.

(7.) I adapt Austen's own adaptation from Scott's Marmion. See her letter of 29 January 1813.

WORKS CITED

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_____. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. London: Oxford UP, 1954.

AUSTIN, GILBERT. Chironomia, or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (1806). Ed. Margaret Robb and Lester Thonssen. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1966.

BULWER, JOHN. chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644). Ed. James W. Cleary. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1974.

DESCARTES, RENE. The Passions of the Soul (1649). Trans. Stephen Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989.

FIELDING, HENRY. Tom Jones (1749). Ed. R. P. C. Mutter. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.

FISHER, JUDITH. "All the 'Write' Moves: or, Theatrical Gesture in Sense and Sensibility." Persuasions, no. 9. 1987. 17-28.

[Garrick, David]. An Essay on Acting & c. London: W. Bickerton, 1744.

GOLDSMITH, OLIVER. The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). London: Dent, 1978.

HOME, HENRY, LORD KAMES. Elements of Criticism (1763). Ed. Robert Voitle. 3 vols. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970.

LE BRUN, CHARLES. A Method to Learn to Design the Passions. Trans. John Williams. London: Printed for the Author, 1734.

MCKENZIE, ALAN T. Certain, Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1990.

MCMASTER, JULIET. "Reading the Body in Clarissa." Clarissa and her Readers. Ed. Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland. New York: AMS Press, 1999. 189-212.

RICHARDSON, SAMUEL. Clarissa (1747-48). Ed. Angus Ross. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

ROACH, JOSEPH. The Player's Passion. Studies in the Science of Acting. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985.

SIDDONS, HENRY. Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1807.

Juliet McMaster Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and founder and General Editor of the Juvenilia Press, is the author of books on Thackeray, Trollope, and Dickens, and of Jane Austen the Novelist. She is also co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, and editor-illustrator of The Beautifull Cassandra.