It was her custom to dedicate each piece of writing to a friend or relative and sometime around 1791 or 1792, she presented to her third brother, ‘Edward Austen Esquire, The following unfinished Novel.’17 The fragment, which is called The Three Sisters, records the selfish marital manoeuvring of three sisters, particularly the mercenary Mary whose happiness depends entirely on jewels, ‘settlements’ and new carriages. It is a witty piece which shows that Jane’s style was maturing and it includes several nice observations of character which would later find their way into the published novels. For example Mr Watts, Mary’s suitor, resembles Mr Woodhouse of Emma insofar as ‘what he hates himself he has no idea of any other person’s liking’, and the ambitious Mary displays Lydia Bennet’s enthusiasm for being married before her sisters and chaperoning them to balls. The style of humour would have been acceptable in the rectory parlour, but Jane’s dedication was tactless.
Because ‘Edward Austen Esquire’ was not quite a part of the Steventon family any longer. He was one of those displaced children whose stories illustrate the hard, pragmatic side of Georgian family life. He was a good-looking, easy-going young man with moderate intellectual powers and, in worldly terms, he was certainly the lucky brother in Jane’s family. As a boy of twelve he had attracted the attention of his father’s distant cousins, the very wealthy Catherine and Thomas Knight who owned estates at Godmersham and Chawton. They liked the lad so much they took him with them on their honeymoon tour and he began to spend a great deal of time with them. By 1783 – when he was sixteen – his parents had allowed the couple to adopt him as their heir, and given him up entirely to these wealthy relations. His home was now with the Knights at Godmersham Park in Kent – though, unlike poor Dorothy, he seems to have maintained a reasonable level of contact with the family of his birth.
This passing of a child from one family to another was not an unusual arrangement in an age when getting a son and heir was considered to be of all-consuming importance, but only four years into a marriage does seem rather early to despair of producing a child. There is perhaps a part of this tale which will never be properly understood now, but Mrs Knight never did bear a baby to oust Edward.
Distanced from the rest of his family by wealth, luxury and great expectations, Edward’s relationship with his siblings must have been a delicate one, and he was not a good choice of dedicatee for a story about ambition and the unprincipled pursuit of riches. Nor, as a young man who had just married, was he the best recipient of a tale about callous marital manoeuvring. As the husband of a woman who was one of three sisters who had all just formed advantageous alliances, he was particularly badly placed to appreciate the acerbic humour of The Three Sisters.
Elizabeth Bridges was only eighteen years old when she married Edward Austen in December 1791, and she came from a stratum of society decidedly above the Steventon Austens. She had been educated at one of the most exclusive, fashionable girls’ boarding schools in London – just the kind of establishment Jane would ridicule in her novels. The priorities of its curriculum are best summed up by the tradition that there was kept, propped up in a back room, an old coach, so that the young ladies might receive instruction in the art of ‘getting in and out of it in a modest and elegant manner’.18
The product of this education, the modest and elegant Mrs Edward Austen, does not seem to have been a great appreciator of wit, and she never quite warmed to her younger sister-in-law. ‘A little talent went a long way with the . . . Bridgeses of that period;’ commented Jane’s niece, Anna Lefroy, ‘& much must have gone a long way too far.’ Anna recalled that Elizabeth was never ‘really fond of’ Jane.
The dedication of The Three Sisters was almost certainly a blunder and a bad beginning to the relationship between the two women. The coincidence of the title with the three recently married Bridges sisters might – or might not – have been unintentional, but it cannot have gone unnoticed.
One can imagine the gently reared, proper Elizabeth shaking her head in bemusement over the manuscript, wondering at Mary’s burning desire to possess a coach of ‘blue spotted with silver’ and her ridiculous vacillations over whether to accept the rich, but unappealing, Mr Watts: ‘I won’t have him I declare. He said he should come again tomorrow & take my final answer, so I believe I must get him while I can. I know the Duttons will envy me . . . ’ Elizabeth may well have formed a poor opinion of the girl who had presented this offering almost as a wedding gift.
The dynamics of every family shift as younger members marry and strangers are drawn into the domestic circle. In the eighteenth century, when family ties and connections were often crucial to material as well as emotional well-being, this would have been a particularly difficult transition to negotiate, but it seems to have been something for which Jane was not quite prepared.
Dorothy managed much better. Her open-hearted eagerness made her very ready to love and accept new friends and family members, while Jane’s more cautious approach to life could make her reluctant to form new connections. There is evident in Jane’s letters a tendency to draw back from people. ‘I do not like the Miss Blackstones;’ she wrote in 1799, ‘indeed I was always determined not to like them, so there is the less merit in it.’19
At times she seems to have found pleasant company positively threatening. ‘I spent Friday evening with the Mapletons,’ she wrote, ‘& was obliged to submit to being pleased inspite of my inclination . . . ‘20 But she would not allow any intimacy to develop between herself and these pleasing young women. Two weeks later she reported: ‘I do not see the Miss Mapletons very often, but just as often as I like; We are always very glad to meet, & I do not wish to wear out our satisfaction.’21
This drawing back from acquaintances may have produced an unappealing coldness in Jane’s manner; but there was a kind of safety in it. Dorothy’s willingness to love people would have been more attractive, but it was an approach to life which made her very vulnerable after her move to Norfolk.
The values and beliefs of the people with whom Dorothy now shared a home were far removed from those of the folk she had grown to love in Halifax. It is only necessary to put that description of her school’s Bible-reading, prayers and catechisms alongside the Northgate End Chapel’s ideal of education for the poor – with its willingness to include controversial books in its library and to ‘try all things’ – to realise that Dorothy, isolated in an Anglican rectory, found herself in an alien world. Mrs Dorothy Cookson was a kind and gentle companion, but she represented a very different model of how a woman should behave than the assured and energetic Miss Threlkeld. There is some evidence of conflict at this time; perhaps a battle was being waged for the young Dorothy’s soul.
The move to Forncett was marked by a disruption in Dorothy’s letter writing. ‘I believe nearly half a year has elapsed since I last wrote to you,’ she wrote to Jane Pollard on 7th December 178822. It was the first letter she had sent to her friend since her arrival in Norfolk and, after another letter sent later that month, there are no letters to Miss Pollard surviving until one written, more than a year later, on 25th January 1790. Dorothy then apologised abjectly for her ‘apparently unfriendly behaviour’23.
It was not only Jane Pollard that she had been neglecting. It seems she had also incurred her Aunt Threlkeld’s displeasure. ‘I fear she is very angry with me as indeed she has great reason,’ Dorothy admitted. She may just have been as dilatory in writing to her aunt as she had been in writing to her friend, or she may have written something that had caused offence.
An unreserved contact with her dissenting friends in Halifax may have been impossible and the situation probably became more difficult in the winter of 1789 when Dorothy came under the influence of the extremely religious, politically conservative William Wilberforce. He was an old university friend of her uncle and he spent several weeks at Forncett during the time that Dorothy was at variance with her relations.
William Wilberforce is best remembered now as a campaig
ner against the slave trade; and he certainly won Dorothy over to that cause. ‘I hope you were an immediate abolitionist . . . ’ she wrote to Miss Pollard.24 He was also an extremely charismatic man. Madame de Staël said he, ‘is the best converser I have met with in this country. I have always heard that he was the most religious, but I now find that he is the wittiest man in England.’25
He would have made quite an impact in a quiet country rectory and Dorothy may have fallen under his spell. Her account of him when she did write to Miss Pollard aroused the suspicions of her friend; by April she was teasing Dorothy about being in love with the man.
Wilberforce was an evangelical. His brand of Christianity was nothing like the easy-going, unquestioning religion which George Austen preached at Steventon, but it was equally far removed from John Ralph’s earnest, open-minded search for truth. The message of the evangelicals was stark: everyone, they believed, was contaminated by Original Sin and must undergo a conversion experience. ‘All men are originally of one character,’ wrote John Witherspoon in his Practical Treatise on Regeneration, ‘unfit for the kingdom of God . . . and, unless a change do pass upon them hereafter, they must be for ever excluded.’26
Dorothy now found herself plunged deep into this belief, which may have been shared by her uncle and aunt. She was grateful for the home she had been given; her relations and their visitor deserved her respect; and she would have found the kind of honest discussion she had come to value in Halifax impossible.27
When Mr Wilberforce left Norfolk he made a gift of books to Dorothy. ‘I am at present reading . . . a little Treatise on Re-generation; which with Mrs Trimmer’s Oeconomy of Charity Mr Wilberforce gave me,’28 she wrote in April 1790.
The treatise was Witherspoon’s and its teaching was a denial of the values of all the people in Halifax whom Dorothy loved. She may well have felt confused and found it easier not to correspond with her old friends. The very essence of evangelicalism is to make religious faith immediate and emotional. Believing as they do that the unsaved soul is destined for eternal torment, evangelicals – if they have any compassion at all – cannot help but have a deep emotional investment in their efforts to convert others. It was a matter of feeling; Dorothy would have been attacked at her weakest point.
Her plan to ‘read the New Testament with Doddridge’s exposition,’ also suggests Wilberforce’s influence. It was to the persuasions of the writer and preacher Philip Doddridge that William Wilberforce attributed his own conversion.
It seems Dorothy was, at this time, under pressure to confess to being converted. Her letters reveal nothing at all about her own thoughts on the subject, and this is the first time that it becomes clear that Dorothy could be reticent when she must; sometimes she just could not ‘lay open the secrets of my heart’ as it would be too painful for the people she loved.
The painful effect of suppressing her feelings is also hinted at. In December 1791 she wrote: ‘I have, during the whole of this Summer . . . been less able to support any Fatigue and been more troubled with Headache than I ever remember to have been.’29 It was the beginning of an account of intermittent illness which would run like a dark thread through the rest of her life. And, as she grew older and tried to analyse the causes of her diseases, Dorothy would acknowledge that mental strain – ‘any thing that exercised my thoughts or feelings’30 – played a part in making her ill.
It may have been an exercising of her thoughts and feelings, her conflict over the uncompromising faith in which she was now immersed, that was weakening Dorothy at the age of eighteen.
She took refuge in the more practical suggestions of the other book she had been given – Sarah Trimmer’s The Oeconomy of Charity. ‘The time is arrived,’ wrote Mrs Trimmer, ‘when all who have a true regard to God and Religion, should make an open profession of their faith, and endeavour to adorn it by their practice.’31 Religion expressed in good works – being useful – was a philosophy Dorothy could embrace wholeheartedly. And she gained a sense of achievement by teaching her Sunday school – proudly telling Jane Pollard that one pupil who ‘did not know a letter when she came to me’ was now able to ‘read exceedingly well.’32
Although she was initially enthusiastic about charity work, Mrs Cookson seems to have lacked the energy and determination of Anne Lefroy or Elizabeth Threlkeld. Her home and growing family were soon absorbing all her attention. After the birth of her aunt’s first child Dorothy’s school was closed for fear that the children in it might infect the baby with the small-pox.
Aunt Cookson seems to have fallen into that very inconvenient routine which Mrs Jennings predicts for Edward Ferrars’ wife in Sense and Sensibility: ‘Then they will have a child every year’33. It must have been a familiar pattern, a severe drain on material resources as well as women’s health. (‘Lord help ‘em, how poor they will be’ adds Mrs Jennings.) ‘We expect that my Aunt will present us with another young one early in the Spring. This is rather sooner than we could have wished’, Dorothy announced unenthusiastically in December 1791.34 However it was something which must be borne with by wives – and also by the unmarried female relatives who shared their homes.
Gone were the days when Dorothy had ‘leisure to read; work; walk and do what I please’. By May 1792 she was forced to admit that a longed-for visit to her friends in Halifax was impossible because ‘The birth of another little Cousin has made me more necessary than ever to my Aunt . . . ’35
The apparently kindly offer of a home – the chance of an escape from her grandparents – which had so delighted Dorothy, carried a price. In 1792 she was just twenty and unmarried, but already domesticity was closing about her like a trap. She loved the people she lived with, but, despite all her hard work, she had no income of her own. Like a child, she was provided with a home and her keep. But, when she asked her Uncle Cookson for money, he simply referred her to her guardians.
How could a woman escape such dependence?
Seven
A Happy Command of Language
By June 1791 Dorothy had begun to make long-term plans. She hoped that a satisfactory outcome to the Lowther case would give her something to live on and she still looked forward to a time when ‘my brothers are able to assist me’; but, in the meantime, she resolutely declared to Miss Pollard, ‘I am not destitute of the means of supporting myself’.
What means of supporting herself Dorothy meant to employ is unclear, but she certainly meant, once she was twenty-one, to take some independent action. She would, at least, make her visit to Halifax – ‘though I would do nothing inconsistent with the duty I owe my Uncle and Aunt, yet I shall then be able to do it of myself without all the difficulty which I should have before my coming of age.’1
Dorothy’s early loss of her parents, the financial uncertainty which the long court case against Lowther engendered, and her strained relationship with her guardians, had made her keenly aware of her own insecurity. In her plans for the future, she was already rejecting the idea of a permanent residence with her uncle and aunt, though that was what her family expected her to submit to. Much as she loved her aunt Cookson she was not prepared to be absorbed with her into a life of domesticity and child-care.
Jane Austen has left behind no such plans for her future and it is easy to assume that she made none. After all, her parents were still alive and she was living in a comfortable family home, but in fact, Jane’s future promised little more certainty that Dorothy’s. By the time she reached her teenage years, it would have been evident to Jane that all the resources of the family were being channelled into the futures of her brothers. There was to be no provision for the girls in their father’s will and, by this time, it was probably clear to her that no money was being laid aside to provide either marriage portions for her and Cassandra, or an income to support them as spinsters.
What did her future hold: a pragmatic marriage such as that of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice? A happy – but unlikely – love match such as Eliza
beth Bennet’s? Or was hers to be the fate which Mary Wollstonecraft so deplored: dependence upon the arbitrary bounty of brothers? As she reached the end of her teens Jane was putting more and more time and energy into writing, developing her distinctive voice and – though she was still employing her old stalking horse, humour – handling more serious themes. Perhaps she was motivated entirely by the love of writing for its own sake; but perhaps she too was considering how she might escape a life of complete dependence.
Interestingly, the question of how a single woman might act independently was one which she set about exploring with enthusiasm. The theoretical answer at which she arrived was much more radical that Dorothy’s. It was rather frightening. She created a remarkable character: Lady Susan, a woman who refuses to be bound by any of the conventions that Georgian society imposed on women. Lady Susan is a moral monster – but she is also a gloriously autonomous woman.
As Jane reached her late teens Steventon Rectory was becoming less crowded. Her brothers were off to university, or to pursue careers in the Navy. Mr Austen – now past sixty – was beginning to take life more easily and there were fewer pupils in the house. So Jane and Cassandra (though they would share a bedroom for the rest of their lives) were now given a small ‘dressing room’; in effect, a sitting room of their own. This private space seems to have freed Jane’s mind and helped her to write a story such as she had never written before – and would never write again.
Lady Susan – written when Jane was about eighteen or nineteen –is an investigation into just what might be achieved if a woman set her face against the demands, not only of decorum, but also of family duty. The title character is, of course, the villain of the tale, but she is so vibrant, and the good characters are so faintly drawn, that there can be no doubt where the interest – if not the approval – of the young author lay. For this first attempt at a complete novel, Jane chose to put at the centre of her story, not a young girl like herself, but a widow of thirty-five.
Jane and Dorothy Page 8