On September 18, 1796, while traveling in Southern England, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her beloved sister Cassandra and stated about the weather: “What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.” At that point in the letter, Jane Austen turns her subject to other affairs, but the quote, even if it about that most commonplace of polite subjects in the weather, is a revealing one nonetheless. There are a great many ways that heat puts one in a continual state of inelegance. For one, there is the very materiality of sweat, which is the visible sign of exertion. To exert, to show that one is working, has been inelegant in Western culture since at least Castiglione. If this is true of men of affairs, who actually had jobs and tasks to accomplish, it was even more true of their ornamental wives and associated womenfolk, of which Jane Austen was (barely) one as a poor spinster relative of gentry relatives who survived in a state that barely ensured gentility through the generosity of her brothers. Yet even if Jane Austen herself was only by the narrowest of margins a part of the gentry world that she wrote about so elegantly in her six mature world-class novels, she did at least preserve her state within that world that allowed her to write with fierce realism about the place of young women seeking happiness and security during the Regency period during and shortly after the Napoleonic wars.

Yet that realism itself is worthy of discussion. Some readers of Jane Austen’s novels, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, find Jane Austen a bit cold in her knowledge of and deep interest in matters of finance that make it possible to live independently. Over and over again in her novels, we find references to how much money different families have to work with. When Edward Ferrars is temporarily disinherited by his beastly and inhumane mother and finds a modest living with Colonel Brandon, the resulting income of a couple hundred pounds or so is deemed insufficient for a household establishment of a few servants, so it is thought that he would have to do with one servant of all trades of a fairly degraded sort. Even families of modest wealth in Jane Austen’s world live under conditions far more elevated than we might assume. The widowed mother of Elinor and Marianne (and Margaret) has about four hundred pounds a year and lives in a modest cottage, existing at the bottom boundary of what was considered true gentry, though her daughters do not suffer as a result of their status largely due to their own skill in making and keeping friends as well as the generosity of relatives. With a father who makes two thousand pounds a year, the Bennet children are viewed as somewhat unfortunate in not having a governess but have a mother who is proud to say that they know nothing about cooking, since there is an establishment of servants to take care of the mundane task of feeding, making it unnecessary for their daughters to sully their status by having to deal with such matters.

Indeed, in Jane Austen’s novels there is a distinct unwillingness to talk about the poop of human existence that ordinary people have to deal with. Although she wrote in a time of war, with Great Britain being at war nearly her entire adult life with the exception of brief periods during the Peace of Amiens and the brief period just before her (premature) death at the age of 42, many readers of her books (albeit admittedly dense ones) pass over the references to wartime society in the attractiveness of regimental uniforms, the importance of the navy, and in the distinct shortage of marriageable young men for the young women of gentry and low aristocratic status. Yet even though Jane Austen is remarkably uninterested in the physical basis of reality, she does indicate, at least slantingly, a close familiarity with the sordid reality upon which her world was built, and it is worth mentioning the subtle way in which poop informs her works and their meaning. In both Emma and Persuasion, characters talk about the importance of good farming land, and we can be sure that there is some understanding of the importance of taking care of animals and using manure as a means of improving the fertility of the soil with an aim to increasing the yield of crops and thus the profitability of farmland. Similarly, the Bertrams of Mansfield Park and the Bingleys of Netherfield have at the basis of their wealth and social position involvement in the sugar trade and even the slave trade is referred to directly in Mansfield Park and obliquely in Pride & Prejudice. That the well-being of Jane Austen’s family depended in part on such matters is a matter of the historical record, even though it appears that Jane Austen herself was hostile to the oppression of slavery and imperialism that has formed a major aspect of the poopiness of existence for many people over the past centuries.

While elegance required a denial of the physical reality of life, and the maintenance of conditions that allowed for the sordid details of existence to be politely ignored and pushed to the background, honesty has always required an honest admission of such matters. How did Jane Austen acquire a reputation as a naturalistic writer despite her polite understatement about the unpleasant and inelegant matters upon which wealth was gained and social status and political stability maintained? A large part of that reputation appears to spring both from her realism in terms of finances, as well as her refusal to punish those social climbers whose skill at appealing to others and ingratiating themselves with them assisted in their own social climbing despite their lack of integrity. In large part, Jane Austen’s cynicism gives her the reputation of being realistic even if she does not aspire to the sort of realism that became increasingly popular during the Victorian era of British (and American) literature. In addition, there is a great deal of psychological realism within Austen’s writings, including her portrayal of the effects of parental behavior on young people growing up in households like the Bennets and Crawfords, With the fate of a life hanging in the balance at every single dance, private family dinner, letter, or conversation, poopiness is never far from the mind of Jane Austen and her heroines. If all of the novels end happily, all of them are filled with moments of genuine threat to that happiness in the situations that the heroines find themselves in. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s happiness is at least temporarily thwarted by the unjust hostility of General Tilney for having been misled into thinking her wealthier than she actually was. Elinor and Marianne in Sense And Sensibility both find their smooth passage to love and marriage drastically harmed by their own lack of dowry and the need of the men they seek to marry to have enough to live on. Elizabeth Bennet bravely turns down two offers of marriage on account of her feelings about the men who propose to her, and by the time she has come around to the idea that marrying Mr. Darcy would be pleasing to her, she has to deal with the disastrous effects of her sister Lydia’s elopement with the perfidious Mr. Wickham. Fanny Price finds herself exiled from Mansfield Park because of her refusal to marry Mr. Crawford while seeing her beloved cousin Edmound court the unsuitable Mary Crawford, until the dramatic effects of Mr. Crawford’s affair with Fanny’s cousin. Emma’s slow realization of her own desire to marry is brought to a crisis through her own unkindness to Miss Bates as well as the interest of Harriet Smith in the man Emma recognizes is the only man she would feel comfortable marrying. Finally, Anne Eliot is loyal to Mr.. Wentworth throughout the novel, and she has been pining away for him for years, unable to move on because no one equally or more suitable has come along in all that time, only to come into contact with him once again where he snubs her and finds his honor entangled with her sister-in-law while he fears the influence of her distant cousin in pursuing a marriage of convenience. These tensions, family problems, problems of the heart, love triangles, and the like are the stuff of poopiness that many people have to deal with in their own lives even to this day. It is to this matter that we will now turn.