Working out the interest: Williams, Empson and Jane Austen

In the introduction to the section Four Ways of Looking at a Keyword, in CQ 49.1, Alan Durant and I alluded to coincidences and clashes between Raymond Williams's conception of a “keyword” and William Empson's of a “complex word”. 1 In this paper I want to focus on a case-study in the language of Jane Austen that will, I hope, throw light on some of the issues at stake between them and on the implications for any proposed continuation of Williams's project. My starting-point is Williams's 1976 entry on interest, which he introduces as a particularly “significant” example of a keyword that has developed general meanings out of originally “specialized legal and economic senses”. The specialised senses he has in mind are firstly the medieval sense, “which ranged from compensation for loss to a transitive use for investment with a right or share”, and secondly the “modern financial sense”, which developed in the sixteenth century “when the laws affecting moneylending were revised, that is, when usury became institutionalised (one hesitates to say 'regulated') as one of the bastions of capitalism and interest gained the meaning “money paid for money lent”. 2