Henry’s kind representation of Jane as the mild, uncritical person she prayed to be was very natural in a recently bereaved and loving brother and Jane’s ideas of justice, of what people owed to one another in everyday social interaction, were certainly very strong. Her ideal of behaviour can be found in Sense and Sensibility when Elinor scrupulously pays to the tedious Mrs Jennings the polite attentions which she feels are her due and which Marianne neglects to pay.8
However, it seems that at times Jane’s emotional reaction to people could get the better of this reasoned, moral stance. Sometimes she fell (quite far) short of her own ideals, and readers of her fiction have reason to be thankful that she never did overcome that fault of severity towards her fellow-creatures without which such wonderful characters as Mr Collins, Mrs Elton and Aunt Norris could never have been created.
The tragedy is that, by making Jane into the ideal Christian lady he wished to remember, Henry was denying her genius. Maybe Henry was also trying to describe Jane as he thought she would wish to be remembered when he said that, in her work, she was indifferent to fame and profit. Jane wrote enthusiastically about her novels – particularly in the excitement of first publication – but mostly this was in letters to Cassandra and this may have been one of those subjects on which the true feelings of the sisters were known only to each other.
In a letter written to Cassandra in January 1813, Jane was full of excitement: ‘I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London.’ The darling child was the first printed copy of Pride and Prejudice and she filled more than a page of her letter with all the natural concerns of an author at such a moment – typographic errors, the distribution of her free copies, the reactions of her friends, and minor errors of her own that she had detected (‘a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear’). After a while, though, she pulled herself up. ‘Now I will try to write of something else,’9 she said firmly. She had talked long enough of her own concerns.
James Edward Austen-Leigh believed that his aunt ‘wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away or covered with a piece of blotting paper’, and that, in her last home at Chawton, ‘There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.’10
This suggests that she was reluctant to let people know about the work she was engaged in.
Perhaps Jane did not want to seem self-important, a fault for which she mocked others, and it is understandable that her family should wish her to be remembered as quiet and self-effacing, for these were qualities much admired in women (particularly spinsters) at the time. Professional excellence was a virtue proper only to men.
However, Jane was certainly professional and business-like over the writing of First Impressions. She must have taken to her dressing room and her writing desk very soon after Edward delivered her from Rowling. The novel had perhaps been coming to fruition in her head during her prolonged visit, and the pressing need for space and time in which to write may have played its part in her impatience to return home.
Imagine having the germ of Pride and Prejudice inside you, demanding to be written, and being forced to waste time sewing shirts and being polite about someone else’s baby!
Perhaps Henry was not so far wrong in his praise of his sister’s good nature. Jane would have required a fair amount of patience in order to confine her irritation to jokes about leering fat women and barbed comments about Edward’s eagerness to make money.
Jane’s new book returned to the central concern of her previous novel: a family of financially insecure sisters in search of suitable husbands. She was establishing herself in the fictional territory which she would make her own and, like the territory which Dorothy chose, it was confined, rooted in the everyday. However, her motives for limiting the scope of her subject matter appear to have been different from Dorothy’s, for, without engaging in political debate, she wrote again about some of the most insidious social injustices of her age while quietly avoiding controversy. Her novel was witty, but neither coarse nor unfeminine.
Pride and Prejudice (and we can only judge the earlier version of the story by the published book, for there is no surviving copy of First Impressions) begins light-heartedly with its famous line pronouncing the ‘truth’ that a rich man needs a wife. It is a snappier, livelier beginning than the description of the Dashwood girls’ misfortunes with which Sense and Sensibility opens, but, as the tale progresses, a darker bass theme develops beneath the sparkling melody of Lizzy’s witty dialogue and hilariously dire relations. The Bennet sisters are living more precariously than the Dashwoods. Their situation is made worse because they have no brother to share his last farthing with them as Dorothy fantasised, no brother even to feel the faint guilty pangs of neglected duty as John Dashwood does.
The Bennet girls’ misfortunes are revealed gradually. It is not until the beginning of the seventh chapter, when the lighter theme is well established with Miss Bennet and Mr Bingley already falling in love and Mr Darcy gradually admitting to Elizabeth’s charms, that we learn: ‘Mr Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters was entailed in default of heirs male, on a distant relation.’11 After that the threatening shadow of future poverty is dramatised by Mr Bingley’s sisters’ disdain of Elizabeth and her sister, and Mrs Bennet’s determination to marry one of her daughters to the ghastly Mr Collins (the distant relation who will inherit Mr Bennet’s property), until, at last, in Chapter Nineteen, it is put into harshly accurate terms in Mr Collins’ insulting proposal speech: ‘I am well aware,’ he tells Elizabeth, ‘that . . . one thousand pounds in 4 per cents which will not be yours until after your mother’s decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to.’12
This bald statement – entirely in keeping with the character of Jane Austen’s most repulsive clergyman – ensures that readers understand the situation exactly as the heroine and her sister struggle to achieve happiness in the genteel world from which they may, all too soon, be excluded. But, though the early part of the novel has been dominated by the embarrassing behaviour of Mrs Bennet, as the story progresses, Mr Bennet’s role in this dysfunctional family becomes apparent.
It is Mr Bennet who, though he recognises Lydia’s vulnerability, fails to prevent her endangering her reputation and her future happiness by visiting the militia camp at Brighton. And finally, Mr Bennet, shut away in the library in which he has habitually hidden from his responsibilities, contemplates the only way in which his daughters’ futures might have been made more secure. ‘Mr Bennet,’ Jane wrote, ‘had very often wished that instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him.’13
Mr Austen might have taken the same precaution.
This passage – which could have caused uneasiness as it was read out in the rectory parlour – is immediately followed by a humorous comment: if Mr Bennet had saved money, the author reflects, ‘The satisfaction of prevailing on one of the most worthless young men in Great Britain to be [Lydia’s] husband, might then have rested in its proper place.’
This trick of following a critical remark with a disarming joke is a device used again and again in Jane’s letters, so maybe it was employed here to the same purpose – to keep the peace and sidestep the controversy which the first statement had provoked.
The fact was there had been no such provision made for the Austen women, nor did it seem likely that it would be made. Jane’s recent experience with Tom Lefroy may well have made her less hopeful of ever finding a suitable marriage partner. Now she was spending hours away from her family, shut away in her dressing-room, behaving like a professional writer. She may have been attempting to make that provision for her future which her father had failed to make.
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The plots of both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility hinge on the inequitable distribution of family resources; and an injustice two generations back in her own family may have been in Jane Austen’s mind as she devised them. If Jane’s great-great-grandfather’s will had been more even-handed, she and her immediate family would have occupied a more privileged place in society.
John Austen, who died in 1705, was a very wealthy man, but his money came from trade. He had made his fortune as a clothier, supplying wool to the home-based handloom weavers and collecting and selling their finished cloth. In pre-industrial days it was a lucrative trade, but John was ambitious for his only son, determined that he should take a step up the social ladder and become a gentleman, rather than a tradesman.
However, this son died a year before his father, leaving a widow, a daughter and six sons.
After his son’s death, old John Austen seems to have been worried that the money he had amassed might be divided and he made a will which would be a source of bitterness for several generations to come. He left almost his entire fortune to his eldest grandson, John. To his granddaughter he left only £400 and to the younger boys just £200 each. In addition he left to each of these boys the sum of £40 to be used, when they were 14 years old, ‘towards putting and placing them out to Trades or Employments’.14 The allowance for these apprenticeships made it very clear that the younger boys were to remain tradesmen, and only the oldest brother was to be made into a gentleman.
Jane’s grandfather, William Austen – one of those boys who had inherited just £200 and an apprenticeship (to a surgeon, in his case) – seems to have felt his grandfather’s injustice deeply for, when he came to make his own will nearly thirty years later, he insisted that his trustees should divide his possessions between his son George and his daughters, Philadelphia and Leonora, ‘in as equal manner as possible having no respect to sex or Eldership’.15 He chose to make his daughters equal sharers in everything he had.
Despite the social prejudices against women at the time, this was a choice which any father was free to make, if he was not restricted by entail arrangements imposed by earlier generations. And Jane Austen’s early novels reflect this crucial element of choice.
This very important distinction is often lost in adaptations of the books as script-writers struggle to compress complex narratives into the two hours’ traffic of the screen. Explaining their poverty to her youngest sister, Margaret, in Emma Thompson’s film script of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor says it comes about because ‘estates pass from father to son, not father to daughter’, but the book goes to some length to show that this is not the problem. The Dashwood sisters’ uncle could have provided for his nieces, but chose instead to leave everything to their brother’s little boy simply because he had ‘gained on the affection of his uncle’.16 Though, in Pride and Prejudice, the imposition of the entail which makes the Bennet girls’ futures insecure lies further back in family history, it is not inevitable; as Lady Catherine condescendingly observes, such a measure ‘was not thought necessary in Sir Lewis De Bourgh’s family’.17
When it came to inheritance, the stories Jane Austen told were not about the big picture, the widespread legal discrimination against women (for example, the laws which put a wife’s property into her husband’s control). Instead, she concerned herself, as usual, with the actions of individuals and the choices they made within the limitations of their society.
The story of the very different choices made by her great-great-grandfather and by her grandfather was certainly well-known to Jane.
The fortunate gentleman created by old John Austen’s will had one son who inherited his estate. This son lived until he was 91, surviving his only child (an unmarried daughter). When he died in 1807, the entire fortune was inherited by a great-nephew and passed well out of the reach of the Steventon branch of the family. Jane announced this news in a letter to Cassandra beginning with: ‘We have at last heard something of Mr Austen’s will . . . ’ which suggests there had been a great deal of interest (and perhaps a little hope) in the subject. Having broken the bad news that none of the money was to come to Steventon, she commented sourly: ‘Such ill-gotten wealth can never prosper!’18
More than a century after John Austen wrote his will, Jane still felt its injustice – as her grandfather had when he divided his (very limited) fortune without regard to ‘sex or eldership’. But maybe Jane’s father was less impressed by the memory. For he does not seem to have been determined to establish all his children equally well in life.
Jane’s rapid composition of First Impressions was disrupted by two family events in the early months of 1797. Her eldest brother, James – now a clergyman – had lost his first wife two years before and been left alone with a small daughter, Anna (who would become one of the nieces closest to her Aunt Jane). Now, on 17th January, James remarried. His new bride was Mary Lloyd – described by cousin Eliza as ‘not either rich or handsome, but very sensible & good-humoured’. The Lloyd sisters, Mary and Martha, had been friends of Jane and Cassandra’s for many years and it was to Mary – whose face was scarred by smallpox – that Jane had entrusted her former lovers when she committed her own heart to Tom Lefroy.
‘Jane seems much pleased with the match,’ Eliza reported of James’s marriage, ‘and it is natural she should be having long known & liked the lady’19 . But time was to prove that a good friend does not necessarily translate into a good sister-in-law.
Surprisingly, Henry Austen described the author of Pride and Prejudice – that classic tale of altered opinions – as someone who ‘seldom changed her opinions’, but about Mary Lloyd Jane certainly would change her opinion over the years to come. As friends Jane and Mary had been equals but now there had been a significant shift of status in their relationship.
Jane Austen was sensitive to the customs which gave wives precedence over single women. In Pride and Prejudice Lydia Bennet displays her silly selfishness when, after her marriage, she insists on taking her eldest sister’s place at table, ‘ . . . because I am a married woman.’20 When, in Emma, Mrs Elton must be given the honour of opening the Westons’ ball, Emma herself – who has always protested her intention of remaining single – finds ‘It was almost enough to make her think of marrying.’21
Now Jane saw her friend Mary take precedence in all these little matters. Now Mary would have the kind of power over Jane and Cassandra which Fanny Dashwood exerts over Elinor and Marianne.
According to his granddaughter, James’s second marriage was, ‘more to the taste of his family than the first’.22 Mrs Austen welcomed her new daughter to the family with a kind, affectionate letter; but, even as she praised Mary who would be ‘a real comfort to me in my old age’, there was a hint of mystification or exasperation towards her youngest daughter. Looking forward to her own old age, Mrs Austen foresaw a time when Cassandra would be ‘gone into Shropshire’ (where, it was hoped, her fiancé would eventually get a church living). ‘& Jane-’ she supposed, would be gone, ‘the Lord knows where.’
Poor Mrs Austen! Her (perhaps limited) imagination seems to have failed her when she considered Jane’s future. What was to become of this odd girl? She had been discontent in the social whirl of her brother’s comfortable Kent home and, after all, what were such visits for but to give a young lady the opportunity of widening her circle of acquaintance and meeting possible husbands? And now that she had returned home she had shut herself away in an upstairs room, just writing and writing!
Then, as the bitterly cold winter gave way to a slow, reluctant spring and the pages of finished manuscript gradually stacked up beside Jane’s writing desk, Cassandra’s future became as uncertain as her sister’s. The second, much more disturbing, family event to draw Jane away from the developing passion of Lizzy and Darcy in the spring of 1797 was the death of Cassandra’s fiancé, Tom Fowle. In April, just as there began to be some hope of the young man returning, news reached Steventon that he had died of yellow fe
ver off St Domingo.
‘Jane says that her sister behaves with a degree of resolution & propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation,’23 reported cousin Eliza. Even in this extreme situation, we glimpse the qualities Jane admired in another woman’s behaviour.
Despite her air of proper resignation, Cassandra’s love for Tom appears to have been very deep; she was never to marry anyone else and her family would describe her as sinking into a premature middle-age from about this time. Jane was probably the only person with whom Cassandra could talk unreservedly of her grief. Time must have been given to the necessary business of support and comfort.
Yet Jane kept on writing. Even in the midst of her sister’s grief her novel remained important. It is another mark of her professional attitude towards the work she had undertaken. Any interruption to her writing routine cannot have been a long one, or she could not have achieved a finished novel by August – certainly not one which would entertain its first audience as well as First Impressions did. Despite its uncomfortable references, the story was thoroughly enjoyed by the Austens and their friends. Even three-year-old Anna liked listening as it was read aloud, until it was decided that it was not suitable for her to hear and she was excluded from the readings. Martha Lloyd must have read it several times because in 1799 Jane joked that one more reading of the manuscript would enable her to know it by heart and she would be able to ‘publish it from memory’24 .
As the novel was read and enjoyed and praised, from somewhere, there came the idea of publication. The book entertained everyone who heard it, so perhaps a wider audience would appreciate it. It is impossible to know with whom this idea originated. Mr Austen is usually credited with starting it because it was he who, three months after the book was completed, wrote a letter to the publisher, Thomas Cadell. But no matter who first made the suggestion, Mr Austen would have been considered the proper person to take that action. Although Jane was now twenty-one, she was still a dependent and her father had authority over her. Just as Dorothy asked her uncle’s permission to travel, Jane would not have expected to act independently in such an important matter as this (and she never did make an initial contact with a publisher herself). If an approach was to be made to a publisher, then her father ought to make it.
Jane and Dorothy Page 17