With that ‘happy talent for invention’ and a similarly ‘happy command of language’, novel writing was a natural choice for her. But, being a thoughtful young woman, she would not have undertaken her work lightly. There was a belief current in the eighteenth century that novels had the power to ‘excite the actions they describe’ and their influence was ‘likely to be considerable both on the Morals and the Taste of a nation.’29 Samuel Johnson – a writer Jane admired so much she referred to him as ‘my dear Dr Johnson’30 – was very concerned about the influence novels could have upon their readers. Novels, he said, ‘are the entertainment of minds . . . not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false and partial account.’31
This brings to mind Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey who easily follows the current of her fancy, turning Northanger Abbey – the comfortable home of her friends Eleanor and Henry Tilney – into a place of horror and adventure in her imagination, and transforming their father, the mundanely unpleasant General Tilney, into a villain of gothic romance.
However, while Jane explored the danger of a too literal reading of far-fetched romances such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell, Dr Johnson and other literary men worried about novels that exhibited ‘life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world,’ – in short, the very kind of domestic tale that Jane herself was writing. Johnson believed that their closeness to real life made Jane’s kind of novels particularly influential, because the readers of such stories identified too closely with the characters. This placed a great responsibility on a novelist, for, he said, ‘that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects.’
Jane had almost certainly read Johnson’s opinion on the subject. She would have been aware of the great significance that he and others ascribed to fictions. It is unlikely that she regarded her own work as trivial or unimportant. And though it was not yet earning her money, there was no reason why it should not in the future.
Seventeen
A Maid Whom There Were None to Praise
As Jane worked away quietly in her dressing room, Dorothy, sailed for Germany. This appears to be a much bolder step towards independence, but the reality of the trip did not much resemble Dorothy’s ambitions. She believed that they would all develop new skills. She and William were to equip themselves to become translators. She was to study alongside her brother and Coleridge.
Making money by translating was something she had been considering for the last few years, and it was not an unreasonable ambition. Mary Wollstonecraft moved to London in 1787, disillusioned with the career of governess, and taught herself enough French and German to support herself by translation.
Things began to go wrong with Dorothy’s plan before she even left England. The projected ‘community’ of friends living together was given up. Coleridge and his wife (who had borne a second son, Berkley, in May) had decided that he should travel alone while Sarah remained at home with the children. Only one other companion, a young man called John Chester, had agreed to accompany the travelling party.
Dorothy began her first journey abroad sick and miserable. She was ‘consigned to the cabin’ for the entire crossing and emerged only when they arrived at the mouth of the Elbe. As the ship made its way up river to Altona and Hamburg she was able to take note of the alien scene and to write in her journal the kind of meticulous description which she had developed in the quiet safety of Alfoxton: ‘the houses scattered over the sides of three hills . . . half-concealed by, and half obtruding themselves from, the low trees.’
However, she did not relish her first taste of foreign parts. She seems to have been intimidated by the strangeness of the place and the people. Hamburg they found to be an expensive place to live and Dorothy considered the inhabitants to be dishonest. After an argument with a baker over the price of bread she wrote bitterly, ‘I am informed that it is the boast and glory of these people to cheat strangers’.1 William was in agreement. ‘[T]he inn-keepers, shop-keepers etc are all in league to impose upon strangers.’2 he reported.
Coleridge was more relaxed. He was naturally gregarious and he was rather better off than his friends, for, not long before they left home, he had been given an annuity of £150 by the wealthy Wedgwood family.
The pressures of foreign travel and unequal finances broke up the Concern. At the end of September Coleridge and Chester left Hamburg for the fashionable island resort of Ratzeburg where Coleridge passed the winter skating and partying in high society. Meanwhile Dorothy and William sought out a cheaper place in which to learn the German language, settling on the medieval city of Goslar in Lower Saxony.
Differences were becoming apparent between the Wordsworths and Coleridge. Writing to his wife, Coleridge was critical of William’s ‘unseeking manners’ which prevented him from mixing with the local inhabitants. There are also some lines of verse written by Coleridge in December 1798 which indicate that he already felt a sense of exclusion, a touch of jealousy perhaps, at the closeness of the brother-sister relationship: ‘You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you!’3 he wrote.
Goslar did not suit the Wordsworths any better than Hamburg had done. The town had a palace and a cathedral built in the eleventh century, but it had come down in the world since then and was, according to William, ‘now the residence of Grocers and Linen-drapers.’ 4 It was with the widow of one of those drapers that Dorothy and William took lodgings, unable to afford rooms in a higher-class household. The place was cheap but, complained Dorothy, ‘We are not fortunately situated here with respect to the attainment of our main object, a knowledge of the language . . . there is no society at Goslar, it is a lifeless town.’5 They spent most of their time alone and met hardly anyone with whom to converse in German.
Maybe it was those ‘unseeking manners’ of William’s that kept them isolated, but Coleridge had another explanation for their solitary life. In Germany, as in Somerset, Dorothy and William’s intimacy was suspected. Coleridge believed that Wordsworth’s ‘taking his sister with him was a wrong step’ because, in Germany, ‘Sister is considered as only a name for Mistress’.6
Coleridge’s dismissal of Dorothy as an encumbrance – his belief that William should have travelled alone – is a telling insight into what he thought the Concern was all about. It is another indication that he regarded Dorothy’s role as supportive only: she was dispensable. He believed that the true purpose of the German expedition was the furthering of his and William’s learning.
And all Dorothy’s own hopes of learning a skill which would enable her to earn an independent living began to fade as the freezing continental winter set in, making travel impossible and imprisoning her and William in the lifeless town where they had only their landlady and her apprentice to talk to, their society occasionally supplemented by visits from a French priest and a deaf neighbour.
This was not a situation in which to gain a knowledge of German, certainly not the kind of knowledge William advocated, a knowledge which involved ‘having your mind in such a state that the several German idioms and phrases without any act of thought or consideration shall immediately excite feelings analogous to those which are excited in the breasts of the natives.’ Without attaining this, William proclaimed – with a typical confidence in his own opinion – ‘what we call knowledge of languages is a wretched self-delusion; words are a mere dead letter in the mind.’7
This was a level of competence which could only be achieved through a year or two’s residence in a country and continual use. Since Mary Wollstonecraft had gained a perfectly adequate grasp of German by studying quietly in London, this advanced level of linguistic skill cannot have been necessary to achieve Dorothy’s modest aim of earning a bit of money as a translator. But if this was the standard being insisted upon – if any slighter acquaintance with a language was being disparaged as self-delusion – t
he task of equipping herself to be financially independent must have been a daunting one for Dorothy. It would be hard for her ever to achieve the confidence necessary to do the job, and the possibility of earning her own living would have been receding further into the distance.8
The weather was extreme. ‘[T]he cold of Christmas day’, wrote Dorothy, ‘has not been equalled even in this climate during the last century’9 . Even wrapped in heavy furs they could walk out for no more than an hour a day, so Dorothy was denied the intimate connection with nature that had sustained and inspired her at Alfoxton. She does not seem to have kept a journal during her time at Goslar.
However, this was by no means a dead time for William. ‘William works hard, but not very much at the German,’10 Dorothy reported in November. In fact he wrote poetry, poetry which had nothing to do with Germany. ‘He might as well have been in England as at Goslar,’ commented Coleridge. During the dark cold days, as he and Dorothy sat beside the black iron stove in their cheap lodgings, William continued to be the poet which Dorothy had called into being. Possibly depressed by his surroundings, he turned inward, considering not the present and the new culture in which he was supposed to be immersing himself, but the past – his own past.
In the same notebook in which Dorothy’s fragment of journal was written at Hamburg, William began to draft lines about childhood memories. As he recalled bathing in the Derwent when he was four years old, rowing on Ullswater, and birds-nesting as a schoolboy, he dwelt upon the ‘pure organic pleasure’ which he gained from nature even when he was very young.11 He had completed 400 lines by the time they left Goslar and, by the end of December, Dorothy was engaged upon the ongoing task which would occupy so much of her adult life – making fair copies of his verses. Her copies were to be sent to Coleridge and, as Dorothy laboured over them, William was out ‘walking by moonlight in his fur gown and a black fur cap’12 – probably creating more poetry, as walking and reciting was always his preferred method of composition.
This odd, confined time at Goslar, during which William and Dorothy were, in the most complete sense, ‘all in each other’, also drew from Wordsworth, some other, stranger verses – beautiful, sad, short poems that are filled with a profound sense of human loss. The poems describe a dearly loved woman called Lucy. In one, Strange Fits of Passion Have I known, the narrator describes visiting his beloved and being overcome with presentiments of doom as he approaches her cottage:
‘What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover’s head!
“Oh mercy!” to myself I cried.
“If Lucy should be dead”.’
While in another, She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, the dreaded bereavement has already taken place.
‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few can know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!’
What lay behind these strange, impassioned and deeply anxious poems? Coleridge believed that ‘in some gloomier moment [Wordsworth] had fancied the moment when his sister might die.’13 And no-one was better placed to understand Wordsworth’s work – or his relationship with his sister – than the third member of the Concern.
Perhaps Wordsworth was fantasising about Dorothy’s death, feeding and dwelling on dark and rather destructive thoughts in order to produce that intensity of emotion which he believed necessary for the creation of poetry. What did Dorothy herself think as she sat in the lonely little lodging room making fair copies of these poems? She may well have believed that her own relationship with her brother had produced this storm of rather morbid emotion; there had been no other love in William’s life, except for Annette – abandoned now for six years.
Whether or not she believed Lucy to be herself, Dorothy would certainly have read in the lyrics a clear description of what William valued, what he loved most, in either herself or a fictional, idealised woman.
Lucy’s greatest glory lies in her obscurity. It is an attractive obscurity, but one from which she seems to have no escape, except through death, for even the few people who love her cannot – for some unexplained reason – praise her. Perhaps this is because she shrinks from praise and attention herself. That violet half-hidden by the mossy stone rather suggests it.
Lucy, in her rural retreat, may seem a wild and natural creature, and it has been said that ‘Wordsworth found Dorothy (as Coleridge did) a help in locating what wildness and naturalness in an adult might . . . be like.’14 But sometimes that ‘wildness’ is hard to distinguish from the unworldliness and lack of ambition expected of a genteel woman. Lucy is suspiciously like Henry Austen’s picture of his sister: a conventionally correct, modest and retiring spinster, shrinking from unladylike fame.
William’s love had become necessary to Dorothy; her whole life now centred on him and she seems to have internalised his image which linked female modesty with the beauty of flowers. Three years later she would herself observe some columbines, ‘sheltered and shaded by the tufts and Bowers of trees,’ and reflect that, ‘It is a graceful, slender creature, a female seeking retirement and growing freest and most graceful where it is most alone. I observed that the more shaded plants were always the tallest.’15
Neither William’s sweet violet half-hidden by her mossy stone, nor Dorothy’s ‘female seeking retirement’ seem much like women intent on pursuing their own education in order to earn an independent living. In the street outside the lodging-house window Dorothy would have heard the language which she had travelled five hundred miles to learn: the language which was to have given her an income of her own. But, on the papers spread before her for copying, she would have seen the woman that William admired: the woman he needed: a woman made beautiful by obscurity and self-effacement.
By the time the brother and sister returned to England, their love had become more intense than ever. The isolation in which they had lived had confirmed, and changed, their bond. It is impossible to know exactly why William had begun to fantasise about losing his idealised woman. Perhaps he feared that his very love and need would stifle the frail, ephemeral creature that Lucy seems to be. Or perhaps he was afraid that she might escape, through her own efforts, into a life that was independent of him.
Independence for a creative mind does not necessarily require a great deal of space in the physical world. Hamlet declares that, if his mind was untroubled by bad dreams, he could be ‘bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.’16 And a little dressing room with a chocolate coloured carpet and cheaply papered walls might have served the Prince of Denmark quite as well as a nutshell.
If a woman keeps an emotional distance from the people around her, if she contrives to have no responsibilities which she cannot hand over to someone else, retreat into her own imaginative world – that ‘infinite space’ within the head – is always a possibility. Even when other duties press upon her, the space remains with its writing desk, its satisfying piles of manuscript, a tenuous promise of future freedom.
Through much of 1799 Jane’s retreat into her dressing room was impossible. When she and her parents returned from Godmersham in October 1798, Cassandra remained behind and did not come home until March of the following year. Jane was alone at home to see her mother through five weeks of illness and take care of the house – with a little ‘experimental’ menu-making. Ox-cheek, ragout and haricot mutton all appeared on the Austen dinner table as Jane made the most of this rare opportunity to choose her favourite dishes.
There was an element of play in Jane’s housekeeping. ‘I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite,’17 she exp
lained. She never seemed to regard looking after the house as her job – she was just holding the fort until Cassandra came home. In the same way, her cousin Philly ‘must accept from my hand’ the family condolences because the real Miss Austen was not there to write. In all these matters Jane seems to have been content to be a surrogate only.
It was the same outside the home. ‘Dame Tilbury’s daughter has lain-in,’ she reported to her sister. ‘Shall I give her any of your Baby Cloathes?’18 Cassandra had also taken charge of the charitable work which would have been expected from the daughters of the rectory. There appears to have been an understanding developing between the sisters of the roles they should play. It was an arrangement which would be crucially important in the years to come. Jane was fortunate, for, as William Wordsworth was discovering at about the same time, it is incredibly useful for a creative mind to have a devoted supporter.
One of the little luxuries which Jane allowed herself as she ordered meals at Steventon that autumn was some little dumplings to accompany the ox-cheek, and she chose them, ‘that I may fancy myself at Godmersham.’19 Steventon – indeed the whole of Hampshire – seemed dull and impoverished compared with the luxuries of Edward’s grand home, and the comparison made Jane discontent. She noticed such things, unlike Dorothy who would have been almost ashamed to admit to enjoying luxuries. ‘People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the World,’ Jane complained ‘ . . . I have no patience with them, Kent is the only place for happiness. Everybody is rich there.’20
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