‘During his stay in Ireland in 1797, when he came over from London to be called to the Bar, but only to return again for his further study of Law, he was engaged to be married to Miss Paul.’7
This would have been his first meeting with Mary Paul since his visit to Hampshire the previous year, so it is highly unlikely that their ‘attachment’ had not been formed before Jane and Tom met.
When Mr Lefroy arrived at Ashe for Christmas 1795 he was not a free man.
The existence of an informal ‘attachment’ which would arouse expectations in the young lady and her family, but the absence of an actual engagement, would have placed Tom Lefroy in a very delicate position indeed. He was in the same situation as Captain Wentworth of Persuasion, who, after paying attentions to Louisa Musgrove, acknowledges that, ‘I was no longer at my own disposal. I was hers in honour if she wished it.’8
Out of consideration for Miss Paul, he could not explain his true dilemma when he found himself attracted to another lady. It would not be proper – in the absence of a positive engagement – to imply that Miss Paul was attached to him. A rapid removal from temptation, such as his Aunt Anne recommended, was the only way of salvaging his honour, and Tom Lefroy seems, in the end, to have acted honourably.
This explanation of his sudden departure accords well with Jane’s subsequent behaviour. A hint of a previous attachment (given to her in strict confidence by Mrs Lefroy) would explain her dignified withdrawal from and her subsequent avoidance of Tom. He is mentioned no more in her surviving letters until November 1798 – more than two years after their meeting. She reported then that Anne Lefroy had visited her, and there seems to have been some anxiety on her part to talk privately with that lady, which was very natural. Tom had recently been staying again with his relations at Ashe and Jane would have been anxious to hear any news of him, but Mrs Lefroy was not forthcoming. ‘[O]f her nephew she said nothing at all . . . and I was too proud to make any enquiries’, wrote Jane.
That too proud suggests that there had been cause for hurt or offence and it seems Mrs Lefroy was being cautious. Jane would have discovered nothing if it had not been for her father’s intervention: ‘[O]n my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.’9
The hurt feelings resolutely hidden here accord well with a separation made necessary by a previous understanding. It seems less likely that she would have responded so patiently to a purely mercenary motive. Why could not she – like her sister – form an engagement and wait for the young man to work his way to success and fortune?
The idea that an alliance between the two was quite out of the question – that Tom and his family were so desperately poor he must marry for money – was something of which niece Caroline had certainly heard no rumour, or she would not have suggested that he might have returned to court Jane after he had established his career. The notion that he was honour-bound to make his fortune for his family’s sake has been furthered by the fact that his marriage did, in the end, prove very advantageous. However, this could not have been foreseen. He did not choose a great heiress, he simply chose a fairly well-endowed lady. When Tom married Miss Paul she had a brother – Tom’s student friend – who was the heir to her father’s estates. It was only the subsequent death of this young man that made Tom’s wife rich.10
If Tom was to haul his relations into prosperity, it was more likely that he should do it by success in his career: a success which would not have been blighted by his marriage to the penniless daughter of a respectable, well-connected clergyman. There is another indication that Jane’s disappointment was caused less by money concerns than the insuperable objection of a previous attachment. She does not seem to have resented Mrs Lefroy’s intervention. The warm friendship between the two women continued unabated.
In her novels Jane shows scant respect for people who consider money of paramount importance in marriage. If Anne Lefroy had persuaded her to give up Tom for financial reasons alone it seems unlikely that she would have continued to hold her friend in such high regard.
Jane yielded to the older woman’s persuasion, though, in truth, she might have found it difficult not to. Anne Lefroy’s letters to her son, Edward, reveal her to have been an expert at emotional manipulation when she was determined to carry her point.
Edward trained to be a lawyer, but it was not the career he wanted, and only emotional pressure from his mother kept him from giving it up. ‘Continue what you now are & you will always be one of the best comforts of your anxious and affectionate mother,’11 is a typical comment from her letters. When the restless young man had thoughts of joining the army, she became more forceful: ‘should you . . . plunge yourself into all the dangers & misery of a marching regiment,’ she wrote, ‘any suffering you undergo will be doubled by the reflection that you have brought it upon yourself & that the pangs you feel are still less than what your parents endure on your account; how my beloved Child . . . will you be able to endure this thought?’12
Anne Lefroy was a woman with an unshakable faith in her own opinions, and she certainly knew how to use other people’s affection for her to achieve what she felt was desirable. It is easy to imagine the kind of emotive arguments she might have put forward to separate her young friend from her nephew.
The capitulation would have caused Jane pain. The young man whom she had seemed to know, to whom she had seemed to be drawing close as she sat in the Christmas ballroom, had a life filled with plans and ambitions about which she knew nothing, and in which she could take no part. She withdrew with dignity, but, if she had chosen to, she could have behaved differently. It is evident from the letter quoted above that she had seen nothing of Tom during his second visit to his Hampshire relatives. She could have seen him if she had chosen to, and done it without behaving at all improperly. A morning call on her friends at Ashe – which was within walking distance – would not have been out of place at any time. But she seems to have behaved fairly towards Tom himself, and honourably by another woman she did not know. She kept away from Ashe and waited for Mrs Lefroy to bring her news.
The anxiety of that wait would have been torture, but a reading of Tom Lefroy’s later letters must raise a doubt of their happiness together had they married. The liveliness to which Jane responded so wholeheartedly in the Christmas ballroom seems to have been an attribute of youth which was lost in the process of aging. There is certainly no evidence of the captivating dance partner in Tom’s surviving correspondence.13
Perhaps Jane had fallen a little too precipitously into love. Solid, respectable and ‘eligible’ Tom Lefroy might have been; but he was probably not a suitable life-partner for a woman of genius. The letters of his middle age reveal a clever, religious but didactic man, whose views were conventional, unimaginative – and extremely long-winded. ‘The comfort and security,’ runs one typical passage in a letter to his wife, ‘are inexpressible which result from no longer considering ourselves merely as our own, depending on our own puny strength or foresight, but as objects of Almighty care . . . ’14 And so it goes on for pages – not only in this letter, but in many others, rarely breaking out an original thought, but displaying a complacency and a leaning towards evangelicalism which Jane, with her quiet, understated piety, could not have relished.
It is to be hoped that Mrs Mary Lefroy was happy to read dutifully through pages of doctrine she had heard before in a hundred sermons. Had there been a Mrs Jane Lefroy in the case, she would probably have soon been reaching for her pen to write a satiric portrait of the man she had once found captivating.
Jane Austen seldom wrote about her own beliefs when she was a young woman, but the core of her morality was consideration for others. She found it difficult sometimes to live up to her own ideals, and, particularly in her letters to Cassandra, the sharp, critical comments would slip out, but her abhorrence of selfishness disguised as deep feeling made her ridicule
novels of sensibility and distrust amateur theatricals. In the end, she applied this ethic of reason and caution even when her heart was broken. She did not let her feelings dictate her actions. Her happiness could only have been pursued by risking the misery of another woman whose disappointed hopes would have exposed her to ridicule.
Jane’s passion for Tom Lefroy proved that her feelings were deep and that she could be impetuous. On the first publication of Sense and Sensibility she received a congratulatory verse from her brother James which contains these lines:
‘On such Subjects no Wonder that she shou’d write well,
In whom so united those Qualities dwell.’15
James knew that saying his sister possessed both sense and sensibility would be an acceptable compliment. Jane certainly valued the ability to feel deeply. But it was not all-important to her; the head as well as the heart must be involved in deciding what was the right way to behave. Her novels suggest that there was something essentially pragmatic about her; she was less concerned with absolute ideals – with the way things should be – than with what was considerate and fair within the boundaries of society as she found it. There was a certain coldness in all this, but there was safety too.
Dorothy Wordsworth, living a quiet and confined life at Forncett rectory, had no better understanding of her brother’s world than Jane did of Mr Lefroy’s. When William left her in January 1791, he returned to Cambridge to take his degree – a qualification to which he was so indifferent he apparently spent the days leading up to the examinations reading Clarissa. (Perhaps the novel had been recommended by his sister.)
There followed a restless, aimless few months that ended in his eventual escape to view the revolutionary regime which had been established in France. Some of this in-between time was spent in London, where his radical ideas developed. His biographer, Stephen Gill, says that, at this time: ‘Wordsworth was becoming politically aware, by associating with men who cared passionately about certain ideas and causes and who were hostile, from varying standpoints, to the present order of society.’16 Dorothy seems to have had no inkling of any turmoil in her brother’s mind. ‘[William] is going, by the advice of my uncle Wm to study Oriental languages’,17 she confidently informed Miss Pollard in the autumn of 1791, even as William was plotting his escape to France. For all their talking in the wintry garden of the rectory there was surprisingly little understanding between brother and sister.
While William moved in the world of politics and big ideas, Dorothy – removed now from the free-thinking ethos of her Halifax home – occupied the narrow world considered proper for a woman, concerning herself with ‘the minutiae of domestic affairs’,18 living within a family, absorbing and conforming to the attitudes of those in authority over her.
Read together, William and Dorothy’s letters from this period form an eerie, disquieting counterpoint and dramatise the dislocation between male and female experience.
By May 1792 William’s discussions in London and his own observations in France had brought about a definite dislike of monarchy and the established order. Writing from Blois to his friend, Matthews, at a time when it seemed that the patriot army defending the new French republic would soon be defeated by foreign forces, he reflected with satisfaction that outside intervention could not now reverse the changes of the Revolution: ‘It will be . . . impossible to reinstate the clergy in its ancient guilty splendour, impossible to give an existence to the noblesse similar to that it before enjoyed, impossible to add much to the authority of the King.’19 Ironically, just as William’s radical ideas began to blossom, Dorothy was drawn to the very heart of ‘noblesse’ and monarchy’s power. Her uncle William Cookson’s former role as tutor to the sons of George III now brought him an appointment as a Canon of Windsor. The whole Forncett family visited Windsor in the autumn of 1792, and Dorothy was uninhibited by any suspicions of her brother’s radicalism as she responded to her first sight of court life. ‘When I first set Foot upon the Terrace I could scarcely persuade myself of the Reality of the Scene. I fancied myself treading upon Fairy-Ground . . . ’
She was as wholeheartedly Royalist as her uncle and aunt. ‘I think it is impossible to see the King and his Family at Windsor without loving them . . . ’ she wrote. ‘I own I am too much of an aristocrate or what you please to call me, not to reverence him because he is a Monarch more than I should were he a private Gentleman’.20
Perhaps she was aware of William’s opinions and paid them no heed; but it seems more likely that he had not shared his thoughts with her, for all through 1792 and 1793 the misunderstandings were deepening. By the time Dorothy made her curtsey to the King at Windsor, she was happy in the expectation of her brother taking holy orders. On 19th May 1792 William had given in; he wrote to a friend, ‘It is at present my intention to take orders in the approaching winter or spring. My Uncle the Clergyman will furnish me with a title.’21
When the news reached Dorothy nine days later she was delighted and she began to plan a home in the comfortable rectory where she would keep house for her brother. But William’s strain runs counter to her joy. His decision seems to have been forced on him by financial necessity. ‘Vegetating on a paltry curacy’, is how he described such a life to his friend,22 while Dorothy wrote of the ‘happiness of receiving you [Miss Pollard] in my little parsonage.’ While Dorothy envisaged a blissful life in which ‘we do not sigh for any Pleasures beyond our humble Habitation’, William would write, ‘all professions I think are attended with great inconveniences, but that of the priesthood with the most.’ 23
Neither Dorothy’s rosy dream of parsonage life, nor William’s nightmare of vegetation were to become reality, but their letters show that brother and sister were not only separated by distance during these years when Dorothy’s love was growing and taking over her whole being, they were inhabiting different worlds.
Why was Dorothy falling in love with a man she only half knew?
There were his letters. William was always a reluctant letter-writer, frequently leaving his friends for months with no news, but he seems to have made an exception for his sister at this time. ‘[William] writes to me regularly, and is a most affectionate brother’ Dorothy remarked in December 1792. It is almost as if he was ‘courting’ his sister at this time, trying to win her affection.
He wrote to her of ‘that sympathy which will almost identify us when we have stolen to our little cottage!’ He expressed a lover-like yearning for their reunion: ‘I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’24
William loved and needed his sister, and his warm assurances of affection would have been extremely acceptable to Dorothy, whose unsettled life had made her very anxious to be reassured that other people cared about her. She loved him for loving her.
Her need for affectionate reassurance was painfully apparent in June 1793. She had had her twenty-first birthday the previous December and was now planning the long-delayed visit to Halifax. Her aunt and uncle had consented to the visit (note that their permission was still needed, even though Dorothy was now of age) and the momentous news was announced to Miss Pollard in a short, excited letter. But eleven days later no reply had been received and Dorothy felt rejected. She had hoped for expressions of joy from her friend. ‘I am much disappointed . . . ’ she wrote, ‘I know not why it is, except that one cannot hear Truths of a pleasing nature repeated too often, particularly by those one loves.’25
William’s letters certainly repeated ‘truths of a pleasing nature’, and his reference to ‘our little cottage’ in particular would have answered Dorothy’s need for assurance and security. She had longed for a home of her own ever since ‘my father’s house’ was lost to her at the age of six.
The desire for a home – a household in which she could take centre-stage and not be marginalised and despised as a dependent – was an important factor in a Georgian woman’s desire for marriage. An awa
reness of this permeates Jane Austen’s fiction; home and marriage are inextricably entwined, particularly for women of very small fortune, from Charlotte Lucas’s acceptance of Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, ‘from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment’26, to Mrs Weston’s transition in Emma from a dependent governess to a matron ‘in the centre of every domestic comfort’27.
The conflation of marriage with home, spinsterhood with insecurity, was no mere fiction. Amanda Vickery has traced the stories of many Georgian spinsters such as Marthae Taylor, who wrote to her niece, ‘you see how lightly regarded I am by kindred, how I have been tossed from wig to wall as ye phrase is . . . ’. Vickery’s conclusion, from her study, is that ‘Few spinsters sighed aloud for the lost opportunity of marriage, or for plump babies they would never hold, but lament for a safe haven was recurrent.’28
It would seem that – for all his own fears of ‘vegetation’ – William was encouraging Dorothy’s dream of a shared home during the years they spent apart from 1791 to 1793, promising the kind of permanence and safety which women usually found in marriage. Since this beloved brother was associated with Dorothy’s memories of the only home in which she had ever felt secure, it seems likely that these shared daydreams contributed to her fall into love for him. But when William wrote to Dorothy about a shared home he was not being entirely honest. To steal away to a little cottage with his sister would not be honourable. Like Tom Lefroy, he had committed himself elsewhere – and rather more deeply.
By May 1792, when William wrote to accept his uncle’s offer of a curacy, he had already met, at Blois, a French Catholic woman, Annette Vallon, and she had fallen in love with him. Maybe he was influenced by the heady ideas of the Revolution which, at the time, were questioning the restriction of sexual love to the bounds of marriage, for, by May, Annette was two months pregnant. Their daughter, Caroline, was born in December of that year.29
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