Lady Susan, escaping the fall-out of a little bit of pleasant adultery with a friend’s husband, imposes herself on the tranquil family of her late husband’s brother, where she deliberately wins the affections of her sister-in-law’s brother, not from any serious designs, but merely to cause trouble. She is a schemer and a bad mother who attempts to marry her daughter to a rich fool while pursuing any affair or flirtation which will further her own gratification. It was not a story which Jane Austen ever chose to work up for publication, but the tale is full of themes to which she would return, and Lady Susan shares some important characteristics with the more subtly drawn Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park. They are both selfish, mercenary and contemptuous of romantic love. But the most striking resemblance between Miss Crawford and Lady Susan is that – despite their determination to live according to their own rules – in outward appearances they both conform perfectly to the Georgian ideal of womanhood. As Edmund Bertram notes with approval, there is ‘nothing sharp, or loud, or coarse,’ in Mary Crawford’s manner, ‘She is perfectly feminine’2 and even Lady Susan’s most determined critic is forced to admit: ‘Her countenance is absolutely sweet, and her voice and manner winningly mild’.
Writing away in the relative peace of the new dressing room with its ‘ . . . common looking carpet with [a] chocolate ground . . . scanty furniture and cheaply papered walls’3, Jane was still exploring the limitations of her world, pushing experimentally at its boundaries. She seems already to have understood the dangers of a loud or a coarse voice. She suspected that more might be achieved by assuming a voice and a manner that were ‘winningly mild’, and so avoiding controversy.
Jane knew that such feminine charms – preferably allied to a pretty face and figure – represented one way in which an ambitious woman might make her way in the world. Unlike Dorothy, she had, in her family circle, women who had used their looks and their wits to very good effect: glamorous figures who would intrigue any girl as she considered her own possible futures. Aunt Philadelphia and cousin Eliza were frequent visitors to Steventon rectory. Jane would have known them and their histories well and those histories are fascinating.
As a young woman, Mr Austen’s sister, Philadelphia, had certainly been very attractive, but it is impossible to be sure of the exact use to which she put her personal charms. The simple facts of the matter are as follows: Philadelphia escaped from a life of millinery, sailed to Madras and in 1753 married Tysoe Saul Hancock, a British surgeon who had various business interests. They had no children for seven years. In 1759 they moved to Calcutta and there became extremely friendly with the rich and powerful Warren Hastings, who became a widower soon after their arrival in Calcutta. Hastings was then working for the East India Company but he would go on to become Governor-General of Bengal. In 1761 Philadelphia bore a daughter, Eliza. She had no more children. Warren Hastings was godfather to Eliza, took a great deal of interest in her and, in 1772, under conditions of extreme secrecy, he offered to settle £5,000 on her. In 1775 the sum was increased to £10,000 and instead of being paid directly to Eliza it was settled on Philadelphia herself, to provide an income for her life – the capital passing to Eliza on her mother’s death.
It is difficult to know now quite what to make of these facts; but the gossip-loving British community in India knew exactly what conclusion to draw from its own observations. ‘In no circumstances whatever keep company with Mrs Hancock,’ Lord Clive warned his wife, ‘for it is beyond a doubt that she abandoned herself to Mr Hastings.’4
If the rumours were true, and Eliza was, in fact, Hastings’ child, the strangest part of the whole business was Mr Hancock’s unswerving devotion to his wife and ‘daughter’. But his abject devotion is extreme in any case. His behaviour and his letters suggest that he was in thrall to his pretty wife. Their relationship is a fascinating example of how – despite all legal inequalities and social discrimination – a woman could hold power in a relationship. Though there is no evidence that Aunt Philadelphia was ever as ruthless as Lady Susan, she certainly shared with Jane’s fictional creation the ability to enslave men.
By 1765 Philadelphia, Tysoe Saul and little Eliza had returned from India and settled in London, hoping that the fortune Mr Hancock had made in India would keep them in comfort for the rest of their lives. However, by 1768 it was evident that it would not. In their three years and six months in England they had spent £5,559 – twice what they could afford.
There does not seem to have been any question of Philadelphia’s lifestyle being made more economical; no suggestion of giving up the expensive London house and living economically in the country. Instead her husband must return to India and earn enough money to support her and Eliza in comfort. He hoped that a three years’ separation would be sufficient to restore their fortunes, but it was not, despite his own desperate economies in India: ‘I have confined my diet to one dish a day,’ he told his wife, ‘and that generally Salt Fish or Curry & Rice.’5
Meanwhile, Philadelphia lived in the most expensive districts of London and kept her carriage, Eliza had lessons in music and her own riding horse. Sometimes Hancock was exasperated by his wife’s irresponsible replies to his letters and her unsuitable gifts – she bombarded him with hand-embroidered waistcoats which he refused to wear and threatened to return. And sometimes he wished that she was a better manager: ‘Oh Philla, had a very few of those hours which were formerly spent in dissipations been employed in acquiring the necessary and most useful knowledge of Accounts, happy would it have been for us both.’6 But he was mortified by the very idea of his lovely wife making real economies: ‘some of your economical expressions hurt me much,’ he wrote in December 1774.7
He struggled on, trying to make money in a country which he had come to hate, becoming more ill, depressed and abject, living in a state of servitude to the woman he no longer had any hope of returning to: ‘While I crawl upon the face of the Earth, I will do my utmost to make you easy . . . ’8 When Hastings’ gift was finally made, it was a relief for Hancock to give up the struggle. ‘As you and the child are now provided for,’ he wrote on 25th March 1775, ‘I may venture to tell you that I am not well enough to write a long letter . . . ’9 He died – probably exhausted – eight months later.
Clergyman though he was, Mr Austen was unabashed by his sister’s dubious reputation, and he was not above using the connection with the influential Warren Hastings to further the promotion prospects of his sons. The example which Philadelphia set – of a woman claiming a comfortable provision as a right based on her personal attractions – would not have gone unnoticed by her observant niece.
Eliza, the product of this odd, triangular alliance, was fourteen years older than Jane, a young woman when her cousin was a child. A great deal of money had been expended on Eliza’s education. In his letters Mr Hancock insisted that she should learn the ladylike accomplishments of French and drawing as well as music and riding – though he was also particularly anxious that she should acquire the practical skills of accounting and arithmetic which her mother so disastrously lacked. (However, judging from his increasingly desperate pleas, it seems unlikely that Philadelphia ever heeded his wishes on this subject.)
After Hancock’s death, Philadelphia took her daughter to the continent and settled in Paris in 1779. Had he known of the move, poor Tysoe Saul would probably not have approved. Back in 1774 he had grudgingly agreed that the child should have a French companion as this was the ‘shortest’ method of teaching her the language, but had insisted that the arrangement should not continue after ‘the Child may be old enough to imbibe the Spirit of Intrigue, without which no French Woman ever yet existed.’10
Now the seventeen-year-old Eliza was surrounded by dangerous French companions, and perhaps she did imbibe a little Spirit of Intrigue. Somehow, she and her mother managed to make their way into the most aristocratic and fashionable circles in Paris. Neither their income of about £600 a year, nor their Austen and Hancock connections coul
d have gained them their entrée into this level of society; so it is likely that they made the most of their connection with the ‘fameux lord Hastings, gouverneur de l’Inde.’11
There is something of the air of adventuring about Philadelphia and Eliza’s life in France, but this was a time of general extravagance, as the French monarchy lived out its last few decadent years, and Mrs Hancock and her daughter were not the only ones who were being less than truthful about their circumstances. In 1781 Eliza married a dashing Captain in the French army whom she believed to be the Comte de Feuillide. He had no real claim to the title and at some point Eliza must have discovered this. At some point too he would have been disappointed to find that his mother-in-law was not the wealthy woman she appeared to be.
‘There is not one in a hundred who is not taken in when they marry . . . ’ observes Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, ‘it is of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.’12
Eliza de Feuillide shared many of Mary Crawford’s opinions, including an unromantic approach to marriage. Her marriage, Eliza explained, ‘was a step I took much less from my own judgment than that of those whose councils & opinions I am the most bound to follow . . . ’13 All the love was on the side of her husband: ‘It is too little to say he loves, since he literally adores me,’ she reported happily.
Here was a woman whose personal assets, charm and confidence bought her – for a while – a brilliant lifestyle. Eliza’s letters from France are full of descriptions of visits to Versailles, royal finery – all ‘gauze, feathers, ribbon and diamonds’ – fine equipages with ‘running footmen’ and ‘open Clashes drawn by six horses’.
In 1786 (when Jane Austen was ten years old) this glamorous cousin returned to England to bear her first child, leaving her husband on his estates in the south of France. Eliza was kind-hearted and extremely fond of Jane. All in all, she must have made a deep impression on her younger cousin.
Growing up involves considering the examples set by older people, and trying out manners and ways of behaving. But experiments are much safer when they are confined to paper, a method of exploration which Jane had already discovered. Now, as she worked away in the luxury of her dressing-room, she was pushing her investigations in new directions, abandoning the absurd and coming closer to real life. She was beginning to deal with the questions which most interested her.
That highly developed moral sense which enabled her to detect self-interest in ostentatious displays of sensibility and danger in the freedoms of amateur dramatics must have prevented Jane from being entirely uncritical of her cousin, and she probably disapproved her rejection of romantic love. All six of Jane Austen’s complete novels record the triumph of love over more worldly marital schemes, and when, in Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford describes how a friend considered a marriage proposal in a remarkably similar way to Eliza, asking ‘the advice of everyone connected with her, whose opinion was worth having’14, we are left in no doubt that the friend’s final acceptance of the gentleman resulted in a miserable marriage.
For the same reasons, she cannot have been entirely in sympathy with Lady Susan as she wrote. But, besides giving her monstrous creation all the personal charms necessary to entrap a man, Jane bestowed on her one more very significant characteristic. Her ladyship has, ‘a happy command of language, which is too often used . . . to make black appear white.’15
Though she had no desire to make black appear white, Jane cannot have been unaware by this time that she herself possessed that most potent of weapons: a very happy command of language. She was still experimenting with how it might be used, but it offered a way of responding to the challenges and tensions of a woman’s life, a way, perhaps, of creating an independent future.
Eight
Considering the Future
In October 1792 Eliza de Feuillide described Cassandra and Jane as ‘both very much grown ([Jane] is now taller than myself) and greatly improved as well in manners as in person . . . They are I think equally sensible, and both so to a degree seldom met with’.1
At nearly seventeen Jane would have reached her full height and, according to her brother Henry, ‘Her stature was that of true elegance. It could not have been increased without exceeding the middle height.’2
This ‘middle height’ was highly prized in contemporary assessments of female figures, and it was a quality Jane herself bestowed on the very elegant Miss Fairfax in Emma, whose ‘height was pretty, just such as almost everybody would think tall, and nobody could think very tall’.3
Henry continued his description of his sister: ‘Her features were separately good. Their assemblage produced an unrivalled expression of that cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence, which were her real characteristics.’ It is interesting that Henry separates out her features and that, although he describes those features as good in this unconnected way, his final assessment does not actually include prettiness. In fact there was a difference of opinion about Jane’s physical beauty. Eliza insisted that she was pretty. But her niece Anna, after listing those good features in more detail – a ‘clear and healthy’ complexion, and ‘fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, & the rather small but well-shaped nose’ – ends on a slightly puzzled note, unable to understand how, ‘with all these advantages she could yet fail of being a decidedly handsome woman.’4
Perhaps there was something in Jane’s air which prevented all those good features adding up to unequivocal beauty. Mary Russell Mitford recalled her mother describing Jane as ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers’. Laura Boyle has pointed out that, at the time of Mrs Mitford being a neighbour of the Austens, Jane was only in her early teens, so rather young to be supposed a husband-hunter.5
It is possible that some of the silliness which Mrs Mitford observed at that time arose from a naïve attempt of the young girl to emulate the airs of her glamorous cousin, Eliza, but it is interesting that the accusation of affectation should appear again. The pattern that emerges in the comments made about Jane Austen suggests that she was not a young woman whose good qualities were immediately appreciated. Those who knew her best enjoyed her company, while new acquaintances, like Philly Walter and Mrs Mitford, found her difficult to understand. There was, perhaps, something rather off-putting in her manners, something which suggested artificiality. Within her family she was remembered for her ‘sunniness of temper’ and for demonstrating her feelings more than the very cautious Cassandra, but her letters suggest that those feelings were not very directly expressed. Nearly every sentence has a little twist of sarcasm or satire, cynicism or exaggeration. ‘I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last Letter’ she told Cassandra in January 1796, ‘for I write only for Fame.’ On discovering that her brother Charles had faithfully carried out a commission with which she had entrusted him but which she had subsequently discovered she could not afford, she declared, ‘What a good-for-nothing fellow Charles is to bespeak the stockings . . . ’6
This is a kind of half-serious address which is easily accepted within a family; but to an outsider some of her remarks could seem abrasive – or worse. ‘I am sorry for the Beaches’ loss of their little girl,’ she wrote very properly to Cassandra in 1796 – but there then followed the inevitable twist: ‘especially as it is the one most like me’.7
That – taken at face value – is both callous and self-centred. A shield of humour has its uses in a large family, but it can keep acquaintances at a distance and prevent them from ever becoming friends. If Jane was husband-hunting, there was no shortage of opportunities for meeting young men. ‘There has been a Club Ball at Basingstoke & a private one in the neighbourhood, both of which my cousins say were very agreeable,’8 reported Eliza. And Jane’s social circle was expanded by visits to Kent to stay with Edward and his wife and their rapidly growing family.
Marriage was in the air at Steve
nton. In 1792 or 1793 Cassandra had become engaged to her father’s ex-pupil, Tom Fowle, who was now a clergyman; though it seemed as if it would be a long engagement because the living he had obtained through his wealthy relative, Lord Craven, was not large enough to support a wife. Jane’s brothers James and Edward were both now married and, though Jane might not have been hunting a husband in a worldly or mercenary way, her mind was occupied with courtship and marriage.
She had now embarked on the novels that today’s readers know and love so well. It was when she was just nineteen that she wrote Elinor and Marianne, the epistolary novel which would evolve into Sense and Sensibility. No manuscript of the early version survives so it is not possible to know how much the story changed over the years, but even at this stage it was almost certainly a tale of two sisters negotiating their way to happy marriages, and of two very different approaches to romantic attachment – one a headlong fall into the unknown and one a circumspect assessment of the character of a man closely connected with the family, a steady journey through the stages of regard and esteem to love. In the story, of course, it is the latter approach – Elinor’s attachment to Edward Ferrars, rather than Marianne’s passionate love for Willoughby – which wins out. The dénouement is a triumph of reason over impulse.
However, when – soon after completing the first version of Elinor and Marianne – Jane fell in love herself, she does not seem to have gone about the business in a cool rational manner at all. She did not come to love an old and trusted companion, though there were plenty of those to choose from. Instead she plunged headlong into love with a man she scarcely knew, thereby displaying the sensibility of a Marianne rather than the sense of an Elinor.
Jane and Dorothy Page 9