These arrangements depended upon her being able to stay with the Pearson family in Greenwich. Frank would be leaving her to join his ship and it was unthinkable for a young lady to spend a night alone at an inn. But there was no reply to assure her that the Pearsons would be at home to receive her.
Jane was very keen to return to Hampshire (as we shall see, there was perhaps a particular reason for her needing to get home) and, at one point, she was prepared to throw caution to the wind: ‘I had once determined to go with Frank tomorrow and & take my chance . . . ’ she wrote. Her family succeeded in dissuading her from ‘so rash a step’. She allowed herself to be talked out of travelling without the assurance of respectable overnight accommodation, and her actual feelings on the occasion were – as usual – veiled by humour.
‘[F]or if the Pearsons were not at home,’ she observed wryly, ‘I should inevitably fall a Sacrifice to the arts of some fat Woman who would make me drunk with Small Beer – ’
The image Jane is conjuring here is the first in Hogarth’s popular series of pictures, The Harlot’s Progress, which shows a young innocent girl arriving in London (with, presumably, no respectable accommodation arranged). In the picture the girl is being tempted into prostitution by a leering fat woman. This preposterous exaggeration of her brothers’ fears for her safety was a way of defusing potential conflict with them, but it was also an expression of Jane’s own impatience.
With the spectre of the malevolent fat woman – and the threat that she posed to young ladies’ reputations – throwing Jane upon the goodwill of her family, the return to Steventon was not made until the end of the month. Then it was probably brother Edward – the leisured man of property, free to come and go as he wished – who took her home.
This whole episode demonstrates how the wishes and plans of her brothers (with their careers and wider interests) must always take precedence over Jane’s own desires. She might almost have joined in Marthae Taylor’s lament: ‘you see how lightly regarded I am by kindred, how I have been tossed from wig to wall . . . ’ Like Miss Taylor, she was vexed by her lack of autonomy. Her letters to Cassandra for this month contain a great deal of veiled, irritated criticism of her family.
Besides the impatient references to Frank and Henry there are cynical remarks about the prosperous Edward. ‘Farmer Clarinbould died this morning,’ Jane wrote on 5th September. ‘I fancy Edward means to get some of his Farm if he can cheat Sir Brook enough in the agrement (sic).’ 6 Ten days later she returned to the subject with another preposterous fancy: ‘ . . . Edward had some idea of taking the name of Calringbould (sic);’ she wrote, ‘but that scheme is over, tho’ it would be a very eligible as well as a very pleasant plan, would any one advance him Money enough to begin on.’ 7
The joke against Edward was not only that he was a little grasping (poor Mr Clarinbould had died very recently) but also that he was prepared to change his name for financial gain. This was not an uncommon practice at the time. The adoption of the surname that had traditionally belonged to an estate was frequently made a condition of inheritance when property passed to a distant branch of a family. Edward had probably already consented to such an arrangement (he would abandon the Austen surname and become Knight when he took over the estates of Godmersham and Chawton two years later) but Jane’s cynicism suggests she did not approve and that she was exasperated by the ease with which a man might acquire a comfortable fortune.
These letters show that she could be critical of the brothers who were already beginning to exercise control over her life.
The meeting between brother and sister in Halifax was rapturous. They remained six weeks at Mill House, the comfortable home of Aunt Threlkeld, Dorothy’s foster-mother, who had recently married a prosperous Mr Rawson.
They must have talked about Annette, though it is unclear what plans William had for marrying, for returning to France, or for supporting his child. He now had no prospect of employment and neither he nor Dorothy had any money. What should they do? Where should they go? Their decision demonstrates the priorities of their early life together, and it must have baffled and infuriated their more prudent relations.
They set off on a walking tour. Unwilling to give up the joy of being in each other’s company and eager to return to the countryside they had loved as children, they took the stagecoach to Kendal (how Frank Austen would have disapproved!) and then walked thirty miles through the Lake District to a farmhouse called Windy Brow, near Keswick, the home of William’s friends, the Calvert brothers.
Dorothy gloried in her own ability to walk so far and in the freedom of the journey. Years later she would recall little details of the adventure: stopping to wash her tired feet in a mountain stream, drinking milk at the door of a public house: little pleasures very far removed from the constraints of her previous life (and from the kind of journey the Austen brothers thought suitable for their sister).
Every step she took was bearing her further away from her dutiful life at Forncett rectory but, though the open-minded Rawsons had been accepting of her behaviour (while probably not entirely approving it), there were other members of her family who were outraged. Dorothy’s guardian, her uncle Christopher Cookson, had, like Edward Austen, changed his name for the sake of a fortune, becoming Mr Crackenthorpe when he inherited his estate in 1792. He had also taken a wife, and it was this wife – the formidably named Aunt Crackenthorpe – who disapproved most strongly of her niece’s gallivanting. Her ideas of the proper way for ladies to travel were similar to those of the Austen family, and her letter of protest which reached Dorothy at Windy Brow must have been strongly worded. ‘I am much obliged to you for the frankness with which you have expressed your sentiments upon my conduct,’ 8 wrote Dorothy in her reply.
It is a delightful letter which Dorothy composed on 21st April 1794, dignified and icily polite, but completely uncompromising. She would not admit that she had done anything wrong, nor make any undertaking to amend her conduct and the pleasure of defying this critic must have been greatly increased by the fact that Aunt Crackenthorpe had been – before her marriage – one of the notable Miss Custs who had made Dorothy’s life miserable in Penrith seven years earlier.
‘As you have not sufficiently developed the reasons of your censure,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘I have endeavoured to discover them, and I confess no other possible objections against my continuing here a few weeks longer suggest themselves, except the expence and that you may suppose me to be in an unprotected situation.’ She then defended herself against the first objection by describing the frugality of her life (no tea and a diet consisting mainly of milk, bread and potatoes) before turning with energy to the more significant point.
‘I affirm,’ she said, ‘that I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection . . . ’ It is such a positive assertion, it seems likely that Aunt Crackenthorpe’s ‘frankness’ had extended to giving an opinion on the character and virtues of that brother, based on his recent conduct in France. Dorothy’s defence of William – her insistence that he was, despite his fall from grace, a suitable chaperone to guard her reputation – was very brave. She was defying the sexual rules of society and religion, and her vocabulary reflects the seriousness of the moment. ‘I affirm’ was a formula used to preface solemn undertakings by those dissenters who found the swearing of oaths repugnant.
Having committed herself unreservedly to her brother’s protection, Dorothy made a spirited defence of her mode of travel. ‘[Y]ou speak of my “rambling about the country on foot”. So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me . . . ’
She completed her letter with a particularly pointed description of her own ongoing education. ‘I not only derive much pleasure but much improvement from my brother’s society,’ she wrote. ‘I have regained all the knowledge I had of the French language
some years ago, and have added considerably to it, and I have now begun reading Italian . . . ’
Seven years earlier, smarting under her grandmother’s praise of the Miss Custs, Dorothy had comforted herself by dismissing those young ladies as ‘those who have not had the advantages of Education’. In her letter from Windy Brow she seems to be reminding the erstwhile Miss Cust of her deficiency while pointing out that she herself had received an education in the past and was still conscientiously pursuing her own improvement.
Despite this hint of smugness, it is a glorious letter that Dorothy wrote as she enjoyed William’s company in the Cumberland farmhouse. And the significance of this fraternal elopement should not be underestimated. Dorothy was, in one way, very fortunate to have fallen in love with her brother. ‘Rambling about the country on foot’ with a slightly disreputable brother might bring down the censure of her more conventional relatives, but it was a good deal safer than rambling about with a man who was not a brother. At about the same time that Dorothy made her daring bid for freedom, another young lady was rambling with another poet and getting herself into more serious difficulties.
Miss Sarah Fricker of Bristol had recently fallen in love with Dorothy’s future friend, the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together with her sister, Edith, and Coleridge’s friend, Robert Southey, Sarah had been indulging in the vices of walking tours and unchaperoned overnight stays at inns. The result was such a severe loss of reputation as could, in her family’s opinion, have only one remedy and ‘marriage was believed to have been rather hurried on, in consequence of some hostile breath of rumour . . . ’ 9 The Fricker girls had been living for years among radical ideas in Bristol and may well have read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman; they shared the new-fangled doctrines of the young fellows who paced at their side.
Dorothy’s act of rebellion was different, it was inspired simply by love and personal integrity. When put to the test, she trusted her feelings and believed that by following them, she was not being selfish, but was doing the right thing. It was a very different approach to morality from Jane’s with its insistence on self-control. Dorothy would probably have said, as Marianne Dashwood does when she is charged with behaving improperly with Mr Willoughby, ‘if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong.’ 10 Elinor, on the other hand, argues steadily in favour of restraint and propriety, for she is all too aware of how dangerous spontaneity can be in the society which she and her sister shared with their creator – and Dorothy Wordsworth.
By leaving her relations at Forncett, Dorothy was committing herself to the life she had been happy to foresee at the age of fifteen: dependence on her brothers. She heartily disliked the idea of ‘living upon the bounty of one’s friends’; but the prospect of living with a brother – of being supported by a brother – was never abhorrent to her. At the age of fifteen she had taken comfort in the idea that ‘as long as my Brothers have a farthing in their pockets I shall never want.’
To live with a brother, she believed, would be freedom. However, a recent study shows that being supported by a brother and sharing his home – though it was a very common fate for unmarried women – was by no means always the happy independent life of which Dorothy dreamed.
Amanda Vickery’s research into the letters and journals of unmarried women from this period has shown that a brother’s support was often given grudgingly, and unmarried sisters were frequently made to feel as if they were a burden on family resources. Gertrude Savile, for example, while living with her brother at Rufford Abbey, felt ‘the very Walls look’d inhospitably upon me and everything frown’d upon me for being an Intruder’. Vickery’s conclusion is that, ‘A household headed by a brother was one of the least congenial for an ill-endowed sibling, if the letters and diaries of resentful sisters are anything to go by.’ 11
This summary would have struck a chord with the Dashwood sisters of Sense and Sensibility. Elinor, Marianne and Margaret are made to feel like intruders in the family home at Norland Park by their brother and his wife, and are driven out to take refuge with more distant relations.
Elinor and Marianne, the novel in letters which would later be converted into the straightforward narrative of Sense and Sensibility, was written, according to Cassandra’s recollections, sometime during 1795. So some version of the story already existed by the time Jane Austen was fretting about how she would get home from Rowling and turning her irritation into jokes about ludicrous name changes and malevolent fat women.
It was Jane’s first complete novel and its preoccupations shed some light on the situation and thoughts of the young woman who loved and lost Tom Lefroy, the young woman who was now expected to continue the life of a dutiful daughter in her round of family visits and discreet husband-hunting. 12
The opening of this story would have made uncomfortable hearing when it, like Jane’s previous work, was read aloud in the Steventon drawing room, since the narrative is set in motion by a rank injustice which is uncompromisingly laid bare to the reader. An estate passes to a son who is already wealthy while his three half-sisters are left to survive on slender means. Henry Dashwood – father of the girls, and of their brother John – is unable to help his daughters because of legal limitations laid upon him when he inherited the estate so, when he is dying, he begs John to assist his sisters. John agrees. But when he tells his wife that he intends to give the girls a thousand pounds each, ‘Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve.’ 13 There then follows what is probably the most horribly believable portrayal of family cruelty seen in English Literature since Goneril and Regan drove King Lear out into the storm, mad and homeless. 14
John’s wife, Fanny, works slyly upon him. Why, she asks, is ‘he to ruin himself, and their poor little [son] Harry, by giving away all his money to his half-sisters?’ Three thousand pounds is a considerable sum, she argues – despite the fact that their income has just increased by more than four thousand pounds a year. She undermines his sense of duty and affection by making it seem extravagant: ‘what brother on earth would do half so much for his sisters’, she argues. She wears away at the amount to be given until it is nothing but ‘a present of fifty pounds, now and then’, which she finally succeeds in reducing to ‘presents of fish and game . . . whenever they are in season.’
The passage is a damning indictment of the way selfishness and the abuse of power could operate within a family, and it presented a situation not uncommon in eighteenth century England. Others had also noticed the same phenomenon. Mary Wollstonecraft’s factual depiction of the fate of spinster sisters at the hands of their brothers and their brothers’ wives is remarkably similar to Jane Austen’s representation of John and Fanny Dashwood. This is her description:
‘ . . . when the brother marries . . . she [the sister] is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of the master of the house . . . The wife, a cold-hearted, narrow-minded, woman, and this is not an unfair supposition; for the present mode of education does not tend to enlarge the heart any more than the understanding . . . she is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on a helpless sister . . . The consequence is obvious, the wife has recourse to cunning to undermine the habitual affection which she is afraid openly to oppose . . . till the spy is worked out of her home, and thrown on the world . . . ’ 15
Wollstonecraft maintained that, ‘These are matters of fact, which have come under my eye again and again’. It would seem that Jane Austen – the so-called ‘moderate Tory’ – had made the same observations, and experienced the same sense of outrage, as the radical writer of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
By the time she was nineteen, Jane Austen – who had once mocked the extravagant woes of novel’s heroines – was becoming aware of the very real injustices that often lay at the heart of Georgian family life. It was an awaren
ess which had been forced on Dorothy Wordsworth at a younger age because of the more obvious insecurity in which she lived.
The subject was important enough to Jane to become the driving force of her first mature novel. She spent time thinking about how this kind of unfairness operated, examining motives and the ways in which they might be articulated and defended. It is not surprising that the subject interested her; she knew that, unless she somehow managed to marry without a dowry, it would be her fate to be dependent on her brothers all her life.
What did her family think as she sat in the old rectory parlour reading aloud her account of the Dashwood family’s politicking? There would have been laughter, of course, for Jane wrapped up the unsavoury subject with comic characters and delightfully clever dialogue. She had learned in this very room how to make the unacceptable acceptable. A few years ago drunkenness, cannibalism and casual sex had passed safely under the distraction of humour. Now she was writing about something which her family was probably even less willing to hear.
The laughter may not have been entirely comfortable: not from Mr Austen who was aware that the rosy-faced, sharp-eyed girl reading from her manuscript might one day find herself dependent for her very livelihood on just the kind of informal, unenforceable understanding which is set aside by John and Fanny Dashwood; nor from the Austen brothers who knew that they would eventually be required to somehow balance the competing claims of sisters, wife and children to their limited incomes.
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