There is still more

The final reference to Richardson (for now anyway) comes at the very end of the chapter wherein Austen discusses whether or not Catherine dreamed of Henry that night. She does not answer her own question because she only introduced the subject to geta dig in at "a celebrated writer":

... for if it is true, as a celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is known to have dreamt of her.

The celebrated writer is Richardson. I know this because a footnote in my edition tells me that Richardson expressed this very belief in a letter to The Rambler (#97).

I can't help but notice that while Austen mocks Richardson's attitude here, she is not so far away from it as we might conclude. Sense and Sensibility is very much concerned with questions of when it is prudent to, or proper to, let yourself fall in love and while the answer Austen gives there is much more detailed and nuanced that Richardson's, it isn't that far from his in its general thrust.

Even more Richardson

Let's stop and consider Pamela, the person not the novel of which she is the heroine, for a moment. The book is subtitled "Virtue Rewarded", but what virtue is rewarded?

At first glance it would seem to have to be her carefully preserved virginity. And that leads me to a bit of a digression about the history of virtue and the way the word changed its meaning.

Once upon a time, to be a good person was to be a good person. That is, being good was to strive to become a certain kind of human being. Saint Augustine, for example, insisted that there was no shame in being raped, not because he was a particularly progressive guy but because that was the logical consequence of the way he thought: to be be good was to cultivate your character not to be possessed of intact hymen.

During the period that Austen was writing, this idea of character was being replaced by a series of restrictions on what people could do and remain virtuous. A virtuous person stopped meaning someone who was good at doing certain kinds of things and started meaning someone who was good at resisting doing certain things, particularly sexual things.

Pamela, however, has another kind of virtue and it is a virtue we might expect to appeal to Austen. Pamela is a very good writer. All Richardson's claims to the contrary, it is Pamela's letter- and journal-writing abilities that lead her to succeed. We see this most clearly after she is married and Mr. B's sister shows up and insults her. Tragedy is averted by the sister reading Pamela's journal. What wins the sister over is Pamela's character and she learns about it through Pamela's writing. Which is to say that this character is not revearled just by what Pamela says but by how she says it.

Which is interesting given the way that Henry has just mocked the writing abilities of women. It is also interesting in that language and tehw ay it is used is a consistent marker of character in Austen. In Northanger Abbey, for example, the conversations that Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Thorpe have, in which much self-affirmation takes place but little actual connection is a standard Austen motif marking a character as morally insubstantial. On the other side of the ledger, the very rich conversations Elizabeth and Darcy have right from the beginning of their relationship (even when being unpleasant to one another as much information as affirmation is exchanged) mark them as morally substantial characters.