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– ‘a very respectable man, though his name was Richard’ – that the centuries of annotation have not clarified. Perhaps there are other examples of names that had some family meaning to the Austens. It is difficult not to think that the characters in Jane Austen’s fiction who shared her author’s name – Jane Bennet and Jane Fairfax – thereby acquired a special interest for knowing readers.
    As well as those married men whose forenames we never know, think of the women: Mrs Dashwood, Mrs Bennet, Mrs Allen, Mrs Norris, Mrs Grant, Mrs Dixon, Mrs Smith. The last of these is particularly significant, as she is Anne Elliot’s old and intimate friend, and the two women are usually found talking alone together. The formality perhaps tells us something of the original age gap between the friends and suggests a distance that remains. Mrs Grant’s name remains unknown because in each of several private conversations, Mary Crawford calls her ‘Mrs. Grant’ or ‘sister’, while being called ‘Mary’ – sometimes ‘dear Mary’ or ‘dearest Mary’ – in return. The women are some ten years apart in age, so Mrs Grant is a semi-maternal figure, and she is married, so Mary Crawford is speaking in a proper way. Yet the younger woman is a good deal more worldly and more penetrating than her half-sister. The asymmetry of their forms of address helps create the sense that Mrs Grant is an indulgent, fond attendant on Mary, who need not exactly requite her attentions.
    Such asymmetry is often telling. The famous example is in Emma , where Mr Knightley uses the heroine’s forename, but she never uses his. This serves the plot: his use of Emma’s forename signifies that he is an honorary family member and a kind of father figure, and therefore out of the romantic running. It helps to sustain Emma’s own failure to think of him in romantic terms. (Mr Weston – licensed by his wife’s intimacy with Emma perhaps – also uses her forename, without any suggestion of offence.) Emma, in turn, always addresses Harriet Smith as ‘Harriet’, but Harriet, with all that proper respect that Emma so enjoys, never uses her Christian name, always addressing her as ‘Miss Woodhouse’. Emma simply assumes that Harriet’s name is hers to use. It is inconceivable that Harriet would have invited Emma to use her Christian name. Here the asymmetry enacts a power difference. It also enables Emma to avoid the damning ordinariness of Harriet’s surname. (‘Mrs. Smith, such a name!’ exclaims Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion (II. v).) But how does it feel to Mr Elton, who always calls her ‘Miss Smith’? Every time he does so he thinks of the lowness of her origins. When he proposes to Emma, who tells him that he should be addressing himself to her protégée instead, his disbelief is measured by the number of times he repeats the name ‘Miss Smith!’ How could he couple himself to someone with such a name – which, as she is illegitimate, is almost certainly not the name of her unknown father.
    Comparably, in Persuasion , Elizabeth Elliot calls Mrs Clay ‘Penelope’, but the pseudo-respectful Mrs Clay addresses her as ‘My dear Miss Elliot’ (II. x). Elizabeth’s use of Mrs Clay’s first name is evidently improper when she never calls her own sister ‘Anne’. It is doubly so when Elizabeth has extended her intimacy to a woman whose interest in her is entirely predatory. In Sense and Sensibility the Miss Steeles so wheedle their way into the John Dashwood establishment that Elinor hears ‘accounts of the favour they were in’ from Sir John Middleton. ‘Mrs. Dashwood had never been so much pleased with any young women in her life as she was with them; had given each of them a needle book, made by some emigrant; called Lucy by her Christian name; and did not know whether she should ever be able to part with them’ (II. xiv). Lucy will not be calling Mrs John Dashwood by her Christian name, but the power imbalance is not as