Godmersham was a vast Palladian mansion with pleasure grounds including two summer-houses, a river walk and bathing house. Jane described a later visit there as comprising ‘Elegance & Ease & Luxury’1, with the luxuries including eating ice and drinking French wine. This – unlike Dorothy and William’s occupation of Alfoxton – was country house living in style. Edward’s observant sister would have been reminded of just how much a man might achieve by agreeing to change his name.
Jane knew nothing like the constant three-way conversations that Dorothy was experiencing at this time, but were the Austen family supportive of her writing?
The question is a complicated one. Her habit of writing, providing it did not absorb too much of her time, would have been entirely acceptable. Writing was a family pastime. Jane’s mother was said to be, ‘a quick witted woman . . . who could write an excellent letter either in prose or in verse, the latter making no pretence to poetry, but being simply playful common sense in rhyme . . . ’2 Mrs Austen could turn the most mundane material (such as the squeaking of the garden weathercock) into rhymed and metrical verse.
Literary activity was part of family life, and Jane was permitted (or encouraged) to read her stories aloud. But encouraging a young lady to read her work in the drawing room was as far removed from wishing her to expose herself in print as encouraging her to play pretty tunes upon the pianoforte was removed from wishing her to be a concert performer. The witty versifying and writing which was common in the Austen household – and in other literate families – was very different from the dedicated labour of the professional author Jane was becoming. It is possible, however, that her family – for many years at least – saw her work as nothing out of the ordinary, and perhaps that is why Mr Austen made no more approaches to publishers.
Mrs Austen is reported to have said of her son James, ‘he possessed in the highest degree classical knowledge, literary taste and the power of elegant composition’.3 Yet no-one in the family recalled her saying anything at all about her younger daughter’s extraordinary talents. Perhaps she really did not believe Pride and Prejudice, or Emma to have as much merit as James’s competent, unremarkable verse.
Cassandra, who was privy to her sister’s true feelings, is likely to have known her ambitions and supported them as much as she could. After writing for some time about Sense and Sensibility in one letter, Jane remarked: ‘I cannot tire you I am sure on this subject, or I would apologise.’4
The death of Tom Fowle brought the sisters closer together, with Cassandra gradually taking on a supporting role, sparing Jane, as far as she could, from some of the more trying tasks that the daughters of a family were expected to perform: tasks such as writing condolence letters.
‘As Cassandra is at present from home,’ Jane wrote to her bereaved Cousin Philly Walter in April 1798, ‘You must accept from my pen, our sincere Condolance . . . ’5
Another task which only fell to her lot when Cassandra was absent from home, was tending Mrs Austen’s illnesses. ‘I had the dignity of dropping out my mother’s laudanum last night,’ Jane announced with mock pride in October, after she had returned from Godmersham with her parents, leaving Cassandra behind to help Elizabeth with the latest baby. There were domestic responsibilities too while her mother deemed herself indisposed. ‘I carry about the keys of the Wine & Closet;’ she continued, ‘& twice since I began this letter, have had orders to give in the Kitchen.’6
It is easy to imagine the relief with which she relinquished the keys and laudanum bottle to Cassandra whenever possible, and escaped to the manuscripts in her dressing room. Her family – though they provided an audience for her finished work – were probably little help in the creative process. Even such a friend as Anne Lefroy, who may have been supportive and understanding of the young Jane, can have had little real empathy with the extraordinary woman she was growing into. Mrs Lefroy – always secure in the rightness of her own opinions – seems to have felt that Jane needed a man and almost any man would do.
In November1798 she promoted a match between her young friend and the Reverend Mr Samuel Blackall. She urged this acquaintance to visit Hampshire, somehow contriving to suggest to him that Miss Jane Austen – whom he had met the previous year – would make him a suitable wife. Jane, however, was not impressed by Mr Blackall’s Fellowship of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, nor his expectations of soon acquiring a lucrative college living; she would sum up his pompous, talkative personality as ‘a piece of Perfection, noisy Perfection’.7
For his part Mr Blackall seems to have been as enthusiastic about the possibility of a romance as his ponderous, self-important manner would allow. ‘It would give me particular pleasure to have an opportunity of improving my acquaintance with . . . [the Austen Family] with a hope of creating to myself a nearer interest,’ he wrote to Mrs Lefroy. ‘But,’ he regretted, ‘at present I cannot indulge any expectation of it.’
Unsurprisingly, Jane was glad to hear that there was no danger of him creating a nearer interest. ‘[O]ur indifference will soon be mutual . . . ’ she commented, ‘unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me.’8
Mrs Lefroy’s choice seems disastrously inappropriate, and Jane may well have been insulted by the suggestion she could be attracted to (or, at least, be prepared to marry) a man she found ridiculous.
‘Oh Lizzy!’ cries the highly principled Jane Bennet, ‘do anything rather than marry without affection.’9 When Jane Austen wrote that line in Pride and Prejudice she may have been no more than twenty-one years old10; but it was a tenet based on more than youthful fancy. Seventeen years later, advising her niece, Fanny, on affairs of the heart, she would voice the same sentiment: ‘nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love.’11
Jane held a very high ideal of marriage. This bungled, ill-considered bit of match-making is likely to have been deeply unpleasant for her. Her hurt could be soothed by returning to work. She finished the rewriting that produced Sense and Sensibility sometime during 1798. But there is no evidence that her father made any approaches to publishers on this occasion.
Perhaps Mr Austen was preoccupied with other matters; 1798 was a troubled year for the whole country. The war against France was not progressing well. After great successes in Europe the previous Autumn, the twenty-eight-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte had been given command of an invasion force massing on the northern shores of France. Fearful rumours were rife in Britain by the Spring of 1798, with fevered imagination sometimes getting the better of common sense.
‘I suppose you have seen a print of the rafts on which they mean to reach us,’ Henry Austen’s new wife, Eliza, wrote to her cousin Philly. ‘It seems these rafts are to be worked with wheels which have the effect of oars, that they are to be bordered with cannon & support a tower filled with soldiers.’
Eliza was sceptical about the monstrous craft. ‘I can hardly believe,’ she continued, ‘that they seriously mean to trust to such a contrivance . . . however I do believe that they will make an attempt on this country, & Government appears convinced of it . . . ’12
The government was indeed convinced of the danger. ‘His Majesty’, reported the Hampshire Chronicle on 3rd January 1798, ‘sent a message on Thursday to both houses of parliament on the subject of the preparations now making by the enemy to invade the country’. And here, in her local newspaper, Jane could have read King George’s speech in which he said that he was ‘greatly relying on the zeal and on the courage of his faithful people who are struggling for everything most dear to them . . . ’
In April 1798, the Defence of the Realm Act prepared for able-bodied men to be drafted into fighting forces, and demanded that evacuation plans should be drawn up, with places appointed where villagers could gather and routes arranged along which they could drive their livestock to keep them from the marauding French. In order to carry out these plans vast quantities of information had t
o be gathered. Lists were to be made of all the able-bodied men in the country, and the oxen, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and wagons etc of every parish must be counted. The Lords Lieutenant were in overall charge of gathering this data, but, at a local level, responsibility fell upon the literate men of the parish – the schoolmaster and the clergyman.
It was not only filling in government forms that would have kept Mr Austen busy. Henry Dundas, Secretary for War, also wrote to clergymen urging them to interpret and explain the government’s plans, to convince their parishioners of the necessity of complying, and to calm their fears. We do not know in what way Mr Austen carried out this order. Perhaps he preached such a sermon as the diarist Mary Hardy recalled hearing in her Norfolk village on 29th April in which the vicar ‘harangd the people on taking up arms in defence of the Country, an Invasion being apprehended from the French.’13
With two sons – Francis and Charles – in the Navy, and one – Henry – an officer in the Oxfordshire Militia, Mr Austen would certainly have felt himself deeply involved in the defence of his country. No letters survive from the early months of 1798 to give any idea of Jane’s own feelings; but in December she hailed Francis’s promotion from Lieutenant to Commander with unequivocal joy, giving no hint of any anxiety over the danger that his profession entailed in these dark days of war. With so many family members in the armed forces, she was inured to the dangers, her fears at least controlled.
Down in Somerset, the national anxiety over the French invasion made Dorothy and William homeless.
It all began with a dinner-party. The dinner – probably the first they had ever given – had taken place in July 1797 and it included, among its fourteen guests, a radical acquaintance of Coleridge’s, John Thelwall, who was staying in Nether Stowey. Thelwall had recently been arrested under the Treasonable Practices Act for subversive opinions; and, although he had been acquitted at his trial, he was a marked man and a dangerous man in many people’s opinion. ‘To what are we coming?’ cried one respectable local woman when she heard of his visit. Thelwell was known for his toasts and speeches and at the Wordsworths’ dinner he ‘talked . . . loud and was in . . . a passion . . . ’ – according to one Thomas Jones, a local man who had been employed to act as a waiter for the evening.
With an invading army camping just across the channel, any talk that hinted of revolutionary ideas was considered unpatriotic. Soon there were rumours circulating against the Wordsworths via a servant called Mogg and a former Alfoxton cook who was now living in Bath.
The tenants of Alfoxton were said to wander about by day and night, writing in notebooks and sometimes sitting on camp stools – which was obviously, highly suspicious behaviour. They had ‘contrived’ to get hold of Alfoxton House – they must have looked too poor to have any rightful claim to be its tenants. They were an ‘emigrant family’ – in other words they were French, and clearly not to be trusted. ‘The master of the house,’ it was said, ‘has no wife with him, but only a woman who passes for his sister’ – and it was generally accepted that immorality and radical, anti-British sentiments went together.14
If the rumours had remained among servants and the poorer folk they would have done little harm, but by August they had been picked up by Dr Daniel Lysons of Bath who now employed the gossiping cook. Lysons was concerned enough to write to the Home Office. Within a few days James Walsh, a government agent, had arrived to check on the odd goings-on at Alfoxton House.
He quickly noticed that the Wordsworths were not French and concluded that they were instead ‘a mischiefous gang of disaffected Englishmen.’15 This was a dangerous enough conclusion in these edgy days of war and fear, and by now the rumours had reached Mrs St Albyn – from whom the Wordsworths rented Alfoxton House. Their one year lease was not renewed. The notion of having revolutionaries for tenants was too much for this good lady, though the equally shocking rumour that Dorothy had been seen ‘washing and mending their Cloaths all Sunday’16 also played a part in her decision.
Ironically, Walsh was wrong in concluding that Wordsworth and Coleridge were ‘disaffected’, for, by now, both men were abandoning radical politics. The inescapable outcome was that Dorothy’s ‘house of her own’ was lost. Just as she had begun to find expression in her new journal, she was in danger of having to return to her uncongenial relations. Her new life did not have very secure foundations.
There was anxious debate over what they should do, where they should go, the only certainty being that they must remain in close contact with Coleridge. By March 1798, an exciting plan had evolved: the Coleridges, the Wordsworths and some of their friends would go for a few years to Germany (where they believed they could live cheaply) to study and learn the language.
It must have been deeply disappointing for Dorothy to lose the home in which everything had been going so well. William was writing more fluently than he had ever done before and ‘his ideas flow faster than he can express them.’17 ‘Tolerably industrious,’18 was his description of himself. However, Dorothy entered into the new plan with characteristic enthusiasm, trying her best to represent it to her relations as reasonable and prudent. She made a virtue of necessity as she wrote to her Aunt Rawson: ‘as we are now determined upon going into Germany with Mr and Mrs Coleridge . . . we are glad that we are not shackled with the house.’19
There was one thing which Dorothy was very pleased to announce to her relations. ‘[William] is about to publish some poems,’ she told her brother Richard triumphantly. ‘He is to have twenty guineas for one volume.’20 This was the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and, although Dorothy wrote as if the work was entirely William’s, it was, in fact, a collaboration with Coleridge: the brilliant outcome of their time spent together.
Dorothy explained to her family that they meant to learn a new language in order ‘to make some addition to our resources by translating from the German, the most profitable of literary labour, and of which I can do almost as much as my Brother.’21
Although she had begun to write, although she shared her life with two writers, Dorothy was not thinking of making money by her own, original composition. Whatever the conversations on the Quantocks had achieved they had not supplied her with either that ambition, or that confidence. Instead, financial gain only seemed possible if she first struggled through the arduous task of learning a new language, in order to labour over the translation of other peoples’ words and ideas. It was only in this that she hoped to almost equal her brother.
Coleridge would say, towards the end of his life, that ‘but for the absorption of her whole Soul in her Brother’s fame and writing [Dorothy] would, perhaps, in a different style have been as great a Poet as Himself.’22 He certainly believed her to have talents of her own, though he does not seem to have regretted the loss of the poet which she might have been, placing that primary virtue of women – the ability to ‘feel with’ their menfolk – above the pursuit of her own creativity.
The Alfoxton journal appears to be a search for that ‘different style’, but it was a style which never developed into poetry as Coleridge assumed it should. So far Dorothy had written only prose, and she would, in her lifetime, compose only a very few poems. The concern of the Concern was, of course, poetry – that was the expression it sought for all the myriad experiences that the three persons with one God shared as they walked in the Somerset countryside. This may have created in Dorothy a sense that her work was only a part of a process – merely the sketches from which great paintings were to be composed – and prevented her from considering as an end in itself the beautifully lucid prose which she was so well able to write.
Jane Austen, on the other hand, lived in a community which valued prose. In December 1798 the Austen ladies were invited by a Mrs Martin to subscribe to her new library, and ‘as an inducement’ they were told that the ‘Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature . . . ’ Mrs Martin might, Jane observed to Cassandra, ‘have spared this pretension
to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so.’23 This was one way in which Jane’s family would have been a great support: she never seems to have had any doubt about the value of the novel form.
Northanger Abbey, the first draft of which was written (according to Cassandra’s recollections) sometime during 1798 and 1799, contains Jane Austen’s spirited defence of her chosen genre. In an unusually long intrusion of the authorial voice, she counters the low opinion of novels held by such people as Mrs Martin with an unequivocal statement of her belief in the value of the work she was undertaking.
She calls novels works ‘in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’ Novels she claims bravely ‘have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world.’24
She had support in this opinion: although she had no contact with the fashionable literary world of London, she did live in a literate society. The writing and publishing of novels was by no means unknown among her acquaintance. In 1798 Cassandra Cooke, wife of Jane’s godfather, published Battleridge, an historical tale founded on facts, and an erstwhile neighbour, Samuel Egerton Brydges, produced Arthur Fitz-Albini. 25
Mr Austen was disappointed in this last work, but Jane was not for, she said, ‘I expected nothing better.’ Her critical comments on the book demonstrate how she was thinking about the skills of her chosen profession. ‘Every sentiment,’ she noted with exasperation, ‘is completely Egerton’s. There is very little story and what there is told in a strange, unconnected way. There are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated.’26
Three things Jane Austen seems to have valued in a novel were clear, memorable characterisation, a balance of viewpoints, and a strong narrative thread. They were certainly all qualities she was developing in her own work. Jane was a natural storyteller. Her nieces recalled her telling children ‘long circumstantial stories’ which were ‘woven as she proceeded out of nothing, but her own happy talent for invention.’27 It is no surprise to find that in Jane’s fairy-stories the ‘fairies had all characters of their own’,28 and it is delightful to imagine a fairyland peopled with, say, fairy versions of Miss Bates or Mrs Bennet or Harriet Smith – or perhaps Mrs Norris as a wicked godmother!
Jane and Dorothy Page 20