‘[I]f ever I do form an attachment it shall not long be a secret from you,’ wrote Dorothy to her confidante Jane Pollard in April 1790, but the subject of romance made her uncomfortable. Miss Pollard had been teasing her friend about being in love with William Wilberforce, and Dorothy had no shield of humour to hide behind. ‘Mr W,’ she wrote earnestly, ‘would, were he ever to marry, look for a Lady possessed of many more accomplishments than I can boast’.
Her response, even to common raillery, was a denigration of her own merits. She also wrote that – ‘[N]o man I have seen has appeared to regard me with any degree of partiality, nor has any one gained my affections’9
. But the convention of the day was that ‘no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared’10, and maybe she had fallen a little in love with Wilberforce. Six months later when her friend wrote again about love and attachments, Dorothy begged her not to ‘say anything more to me upon the subject’11. Maybe she had been attracted to Wilberforce and did not wish to be reminded that he had been more interested in her immortal soul than her personal charms, for she did not abide by her own embargo. In a postscript to a letter written the following March she joked about a Mr Edward Swain: ‘Ought I to rejoice at his marriage, for do I know what might have been my chance for him?’12
By the time she reached the end of her teens, Dorothy was – like nearly every other girl of her age – interested in love and eager to hear about weddings. She pressed Miss Pollard to tell her details of the wedding of her Aunt Threlkeld who, about this time, married (at the age of 45) a pleasant widower.
It is hard to know whether Dorothy’s assessment of her own attractions was sound. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who met her just a few years later, would remark, ‘if you expected to find a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary – if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty!’13 which suggests a pleasant, though not a striking, appearance. She had now arrived at the age when her looks – and how men reacted to them – would have been a matter of anxiety. With no fortune and few respectable careers other than marriage open to her, much of a woman’s future depended on her appearance and attractiveness, her manner, her ability to make a good impression. These were her qualifications, and the report that other people made of her was the CV on which her career was founded.
The calculations of women’s attractions which are constantly being made in Jane Austen’s fiction would have been a commonplace of real life at the time and it is surprising, when those calculations are looked at closely, how intrusive and deeply unpleasant they are. The beauty of the new bride, Mrs Elton, is to be calibrated on a sliding scale by the inhabitants of Highbury: ‘it must be left for the visits in form . . . to settle whether she were very pretty indeed, or only rather pretty, or not pretty at all.’14 Fanny Price’s looks are to be jealously evaluated by dozens of disappointed women when they hear that she has won the heart of the eligible Henry Crawford. She is told that ‘your eyes, and your teeth, and how you do your hair,’15will all be enquired into.
Jane herself sometimes subjected other women to this kind of scrutiny. Reporting to Cassandra on her brother Henry’s new fiancée in 1796, she wrote: ‘pray be careful not to expect too much Beauty . . . ’16
She became even more harsh with age: ‘I never saw a family, five sisters so very plain,’ she told Cassandra in 1813 when describing the unfortunate Misses Fagg. ‘Miss Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, & that comprises all the good Looks of the family.’17 That separating out of features, which is evident in the recollections of Jane’s relations, seems to have been a common way of assessing a woman. It appears almost as a checklist as Caroline Bingley makes her spiteful summing up of Elizabeth Bennet: ‘Her face is too thin; her complexion has no brilliancy . . . Her nose wants character; her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes . . . ’18 It was a particularly unpleasant approach because it turned women’s eyes, teeth, complexions and noses into commodities that could be traded on the marriage market. It must have been stressful for any young woman to know that her appearance was being measured in this way. For a girl who was at all uncertain of herself it would have been traumatic.
One cause of Dorothy’s discomfort in October 1790 may have been a fear that her looks would soon deteriorate. She may well, by now, have realised that there was a severe flaw in one of her features – one which was frequently singled out for comment. Dorothy’s teeth were certainly not ‘out of the common way’: they were not even ‘tolerable’.
In an age of rudimentary – and terrifyingly painful – dentistry, how strong her teeth were made an enormous difference to a woman’s appearance (and, consequently, her prospects in life). Meeting Jane Austen’s mother for the first time, Philly Walter remarked: ‘My aunt has lost several fore-teeth which makes her look old’19. Mrs Austen was then forty-nine, married with a growing family. Looking old was acceptable in her circumstances, but it was nothing short of disaster for a woman’s teeth to begin to fail her while she was still young and unmarried.
Dorothy’s did. Woven through the rapturous descriptions of the Lake District in her Grasmere journals there would be the heart-rending tale of Dorothy’s teeth – lost and broken and aching - but it was soon after October 1790 – and Dorothy’s insistence that her friend should not tease her about lovers – that this tragic saga began. By March of the following year, she was ‘much troubled with the toothache’ and forced to have two teeth drawn by a surgeon in Norwich.20 She did not mention whether these were ‘fore-teeth’; but it would not be long before tooth-loss began to make Dorothy look much older than she was, destroying that unobtrusive prettiness upon which Coleridge remarked.
Twenty-first century readers, looking back from the – comparative – luxury of a society in which a woman’s right to earn her own living is enshrined in law, are sometimes inclined to find Jane Austen’s novels trivial, because they seem to be about nothing but the search for a marriage partner. However this view fails to take into account the true situation of girls like the Bennet sisters of Pride and Prejudice. Consider for a moment the prospect which has hung before Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia ever since they were old enough to understand the workings of their world. Their father will die; their cousin, Mr Collins, will, under the terms of the entail, inherit Longbourn; they will be homeless. While their mother lives they will have no money of their own at all; improvident as she is, they will be entirely dependent on her, and after she dies (if she has not by then gone through all the money – an extravagance of which she seems entirely capable) ‘one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents’ will give them £40 a year each. This tiny income – and the few resources (such as governessing) which might supplement it – would cut them off entirely from the society in which they have grown up. They would be alone with no welfare system to support them in sickness or old age and no respectable means of improving their lot.
In a sermon of 1762 a certain Dr Dodd lamented the situation of young women whose parents ‘expend much on boarding schools’ for daughters who, left to fend for themselves, find the world a hostile place: ‘So few the occupations which they can pursue . . . so small . . . the profits arising from their labours, and so difficult often the power of obtaining employment . . . ’
It was the same problem which Mary Wollstonecraft and Priscilla Wakefield would identify; but Dr Dodd was no educational theorist. He was a clergyman, and he gave this sermon to the governors’ meeting of the Magdalen Hospital for the reception of Penitent Prostitutes. He continued his discourse with the dire warning that many such ‘virtuous and decent young women . . . have been compelled to the horrid necessity . . . of procuring bread by prostitution.’21
It is a stark reminder of the straits in which even women whose parents had been wealthy enough to afford boarding school fees could sometimes find themselves.
Little wonder that hopes of a respectable – and
, ideally, happy – marriage tend to occupy the Bennet sisters’ thoughts. It is the only alternative to a kind of poverty which it is hard for us to comprehend. But the girls’ happiness balances on a knife’s edge. In the few years available to them before their teeth begin to fall out, or sickness dulls the ‘brilliancy’ of their complexions, they must find the right husband. There was nothing trivial about that.
Georgian England was not the world of the ‘rom-com’; marriage was for life. Divorce could only be got by an act of parliament and required financial resources comparable to those of a present day multi-millionaire. A legal separation came a little cheaper, but, like those of divorce, its terms were heavily weighted against women. A man’s adultery was not sufficient grounds, though a woman’s was, and only a degree of violence that endangered her life was considered sufficient cause for a woman to bring a complaint against her husband. The law protected a man’s right to ‘chastise’ his wife, and to enforce her ‘marital duty’.
Time was short and girls only glimpsed eligible men in the ballroom and at the dining table. Most of a gentleman’s life was lived beyond female surveillance. If a woman made a false move during this crucial period of her life she could find herself unmarried and destitute, or else imprisoned for ever in a house with a tyrant, subject to humiliation, violence and repeated rape.
No Georgian reader with a modicum of intelligence would have considered a novel about a woman’s search for a husband to be trivial, but the part which love played in all this was ambiguous. To hold out for love, to believe in love, in this treacherous, dangerous world could be presented as an act of heroism and integrity, or love could simply be regarded as a messy complication which endangered a woman’s prospects, rather like a twenty-first century woman allowing the mixing of her sex and work lives to spoil her chances of promotion.
Another alternative was to make love less dangerous by the means advocated in Jane Austen’s first two mature novels: thorough knowledge of the gentleman. It is one of the great triumphs of Pride and Prejudice that it succeeds in making Elizabeth’s cautious, slow grown love for Darcy appear not only safer, but also much, much more sexy than Lydia’s impetuous elopement with Wickham.
It is in this crucial arena – those few, vital years of a woman’s life when she was adult, unmarried and marriageable – that Jane Austen dramatises Marianne and Elinor’s different philosophies, as one falls headlong into love with a stranger and allows her love to dictate every action and speech, while the other admits gradually to the charms of a close family connection, and holds her emotions in check.
Yet Jane herself fell in love with a stranger, while Dorothy Wordsworth, the great advocate of spontaneous feeling, fell in love gradually with a man she had known all her life.
Nine
Falling in Love
Jane Austen was twenty years old when she fell in love and Dorothy Wordsworth was about the same age – though, because her love grew slowly, it is impossible to date exactly. Their letters suggest some similarity of experience: excitement, a slight loss of reason, an overwhelming need to talk about the beloved.
The ways in which they fell into love were very different, with the rational Jane surrendering her heart over a few nights spent in crowded ballrooms, and the avowedly impulsive Dorothy gradually allowing her affection for one man to develop into an exclusive devotion over several years. The two women certainly responded very differently to the obstacles which Georgian society placed in the course of true love. The decisions which they took, and the ways in which they negotiated this crucial rite-of-passage, could hardly have been more different. But the experience would have a long-term impact on both their lives.
By the time she wrote the earliest of her letters to survive, Jane was already in love – and had been, perhaps, for a week or so. Her love pulses irrepressibly through two letters which she wrote between 9th and 15th January 1796. Addressed to Cassandra, who was away at Kintbury staying with the family of her fiancé, these early letters are lively and very young. They are quite unlike any of the other letters which Cassandra allowed to survive.
The name of the beloved found its way into the second sentence of the first letter. Jane opened with her sister’s birthday: ‘In the first place I hope you will live twenty-three years longer’, but this subject (as any other would have done) served to introduce the name which filled her thoughts: ‘Mr Tom Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday . . . ’1
Mr Tom Lefroy suffuses this first letter, intruding again and again as Jane attempts to give a dispassionate account of the family’s comings and goings and the previous night’s ball at Manydown. He just cannot be kept out. After providing a list of the people attending the dance, the letter reverts to a description of Jane’s own scandalous behaviour during the evening.
It seems Miss Jane Austen and Mr Lefroy had spent far too much time enjoying one another’s company. ‘Imagine to yourself, everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together,’ wrote Jane dramatically. She was trying to use humour to ridicule her own emotions as she had mocked the sensibility of other girls in Love and Friendship, but that playful, ironic tone which would, in the course of her correspondence, be used again and again to conceal her own feelings, was, on this occasion, like an inadequate gown hastily let down to cover a muddy petticoat – ‘not doing its office’.2
Mr Lefroy was so recent an acquaintance that Cassandra had not yet met him; so Jane hastened to assure her that he was ‘a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man’. And there was comfort – of a sort – for Cassandra: ‘I can expose myself only once more,’ wrote Jane, ‘because he leaves the country soon after next Friday’.
Thoughts of Tom Lefroy dominate this letter – but, after being introduced in the second sentence, his name is made conspicuous by its absence. All sorts of linguistic tricks are evident: Tom is ‘my friend’, ‘my Irish friend’, ‘the other’ or, more usually, simply ‘he’. The name is only written again towards the end of the letter when, it appears, he intruded in a physical form: a visit from him and his young cousin interrupting Jane’s writing.
Years later, when she came to write Emma, Jane would recall the disturbing potency of a beloved’s name. Emma Woodhouse, fantasising that she is in love with Frank Churchill, fears she will be unable to speak his name calmly in company and is preparing to substitute such an awkward alternative as ‘your correspondent in Yorkshire’ – but finds, at the last minute, that it is not necessary after all. Her ability to pronounce Frank’s name without embarrassment is a proof of her not being in love3.
In January 1796, Emma’s creator was not so heart-free, and such was her own enthusiasm for this remarkable Mr Lefroy that she believed her sister must share her interest. ‘I wish Charles had been at Manydown,’ she wrote, ‘because he would have given you some description of my friend, and I think you must be impatient to hear something about him.’
Cassandra had probably, by now, read enough of her sister’s effusions to wish very much to know more about this extraordinary man who had, apparently, ‘but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light.’
Cassandra would have been reassured to know that the delectable Tom was the nephew of their old and highly respected friend, Anne Lefroy. He was just a month younger than Jane, the eldest son of a large, respectable family in Ireland. He had recently left Trinity College Dublin where he had ‘attended all the class examinations . . . taking the highest prize each year’; and he was now come to England where he was spending the Christmas holidays with his relations before enrolling at the inns of court in London in order to study Law.
All this, though it might have done something to soothe Cassandra’s fears, cannot explain Jane’s headlong plunge into love. What was so intoxicating, so remarkable, about Mr Tom Lefroy? What did Jane see in him that was different from the Hampshire swains who surrounded her?
‘My Irish friend’ has, i
nevitably, attracted a great deal of attention from everyone interested in Jane Austen’s life and work, and perhaps the impetuosity of her own letters has contributed to the image of him (most evident in the fictional portrayal Becoming Jane) as an attractive but disreputable figure. However, this ignores the significant body of evidence that survives about Tom Lefroy’s character. Incongruous though it seems, this devastating young man who could melt a woman’s heart in the ball-room was, eventually, to become the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. A very dignified portrait of him in later life with beaky nose, vast judicial wig and a severe expression around the mouth, rather gives the impression of a man pronouncing the death sentence and, if looked at too long, might destroy any sense of romance about this episode in Jane’s life. A memoir of his career was published in 1871 by his son and, there are, preserved within it, several letters which testify to the very positive impression Tom Lefroy made on others when he was a young man.
There was nothing disreputable about him. He was certainly brilliant and studious. When he was only fourteen, his great uncle, Benjamin Langlois, believed: ‘He is so advanced for his years that, unless vice and bad example lead him astray he will . . . be highly qualified.’ On the completion of his time at Trinity College, his tutor, Dr Burrowes, wrote modestly: ‘for his success at college I can claim no credit. It was entirely the effect of his own talents and judicious diligence.’4
He also seems to have possessed very solid virtues which endeared him to his elders. His Uncle Langlois found him to have ‘as little to correct in him as ever I saw in one of his age.’ And Dr Burrowes praised his ‘religious principles . . . his desire of knowledge and his just ambition.’5 These were the qualities which were to make him successful in later life; but elsewhere in his tutor’s account, we can glimpse the attractions which might have captivated Jane.
Jane and Dorothy Page 10