This is a revealing summary of the situation. It shows a slight doubt whether Edward will do the least that he ought, and no expectation of him doing more than the minimum. It shows that Cassandra’s income – the tiny amount of interest which she received from a £1,000 legacy left by her fiancé, Tom Fowle – was counted by her brother as belonging to her mother. Above all, it makes Jane’s situation painfully clear. She was to have nothing of her own, no regular income or allowance. Not one of the Austen brothers seems to have considered making a separate allowance to his sisters. Mrs Austen was to hold the purse strings for the rest of her life.
The loss of her father did not bring any more autonomy to Jane’s life and her mother’s choices do not seem to have been the ones she would have made. Like Anne Elliot of Persuasion, Jane’s preference would almost certainly have been for ‘another house in the country . . . A small house in their own neighbourhood’.9 But, like Anne’s, her wishes were disregarded. The three women continued to live in Bath, in rented lodgings, and to make long stays with family and friends. It was a disrupted way of life, particularly ill-suited to the demands of writing and, after abandoning The Watsons, Jane seems to have once more found herself unable to work.
At the time of Mr Austen’s death none of the brothers offered to set the women up in a permanent home. Edward, with his large estates at Chawton and Godmersham, owned several houses suitable to accommodate them, but he does not seem – at this time – to have offered any of them.
The Austen women lost status by Mr Austen’s death.
‘I believe that my mother [will] remain in this house till Lady Day,’ Henry wrote to Francis soon after their bereavement, ‘and then probably reduce her establishment to one female Domestic and take furnished lodgings.’10 In his next letter, he assured his brother (and, probably, himself) that ‘a smaller establishment will be as agreeable to them, as it cannot but be feasible.’11
Just why he supposed they would find a smaller establishment agreeable, Henry did not say. Despite his cheeriness, it is likely that Jane was distressed by a change which would have had a significant impact on a family of genteel women. The washing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, fire-lighting, coal-carrying, fire-tending, water-carrying, food-preserving, ironing, marketing etc for even the smallest middle-class household could not be accomplished by one person. Living in a one servant family meant that the ladies of the house got their hands dirty – probably very dirty indeed.
One female domestic and furnished lodgings is exactly the situation of Miss Bates in Emma. She too is the unmarried daughter of a clergyman living with her widowed mother, and it is clear that Jane does not consider her life to be ‘agreeable’. She is unequivocally described as ‘poor’ and ‘has sunk from the comforts she was born to’.12
Jane cared about money and status. She had always lived among people who cared about them. The attention to financial detail in her books is extreme, and although her novels are undoubtedly love stories, she never gives her sanction to imprudent love matches any more than she does to mercenary, ambitious marriages. In the closing chapters of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood, sure at last of the affection of her Edward, is still not ‘quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life.’13 Earlier in the story, Elinor has maintained that with an income less than £1,000 a year ‘every kind of external comfort must be wanting’.14
Jane Austen would certainly have considered the life Dorothy Wordsworth was leading at this time as wanting every kind of external comfort.
Though she now had a sister-in-law to help with the work in Dove Cottage, any amelioration in Dorothy’s daily round of chores did not last long. As at Forncett, the arrival of ‘little relations’ was soon curtailing their aunt’s freedom. ‘I really have been overwrought with positive labour’ she wrote in May 1804 when Mary was pregnant with her second child. ‘Our old Servant . . . has left us, and we have been engaged in a Whitsuntide cleaning, colouring and painting etc etc . . . [F]or the last six weeks . . . we have had no servant but a little Girl, therefore, my Sister not being very strong, I was glad to take upon myself the charge of putting things in order.’15
However, Dorothy had two advantages over Jane. Firstly, not every family distributed its resources as unevenly as the Austens. By the time Jane was forced to be financially dependent upon a mother with whom she never quite saw eye to eye, Dorothy had at last acquired a little capital of her own.
In 1802 Sir James Lowther, the ‘Bad Earl’, who had withheld the Wordsworth children’s inheritance, died, and, on inheriting, his heir, Sir William Lowther, placed in the Cumberland Pacquet an advertisement inviting ‘all Persons with any demands on the late Earl’ to claim what was due to them. News of this exciting development reached William and Dorothy on 18th June when their friend Captain Luff arrived to tell them of ‘Lord Lowther’s intention to pay all debts etc’. Predictably the emotional shock gave Dorothy ‘a woeful headache’ and disturbed her sleep. But she was soon able to enjoy the turn of fortune: two days later she and William ‘talked sweetly together about the disposal of our riches.’
Of course, payment took a little while (and several rather imperious letters were sent to brother Richard who was dealing with the affair). But, by July 1803, Dorothy could write that the total to be paid was ‘eight thousand five hundred pounds’ and ‘The whole of the money is to be paid in a year.’ 16
This sum was to be divided equally between the Wordsworth siblings – ‘having no respect to sex or Eldership’, to employ the words of Jane Austen’s grandfather’s will. Dorothy’s share was £1,700. It was a little bit of security and it meant a great deal to Dorothy. She referred to it – when discussing its investment with Richard – as ‘my independence’17 . Having money of her own must have been psychologically reassuring. Unlike Jane, she could feel herself the equal of those among whom she lived, even though her ‘riches’ were not sufficient to substantially change her lifestyle.
However, the second advantage Dorothy had over Jane was her very comforting contempt for the ways of the rich. She gloried in her simple way of life and regarded it as virtuous. On 2nd October 1800 she and some friends could enjoy ‘a pleasant conversation about the manners of the rich – avarice, inordinate desires . . . ’18 This sort of conversation could help to sustain a woman when she was cooking giblet pies and spring cleaning. Jane had neither such a philosophy, nor the kind of friends with whom she could discuss it. She lived among people who were all richer than herself – some of them very much richer.
Within her own little household she was also the poorest. Even her sister had a tiny income, while Jane remained dependent on her mother and arbitrary gifts from her richer relatives. The only sums she could call her own were that £10 from Crosby and an inheritance of £50 left her by a friend in 1806.19
Unable to despise the wealthy, conscious of her own respect for wealth, and suspecting, perhaps, that it was not a very amiable bias, Jane frequently laughed at herself in her letters by playfully conflating good character and riches. ‘[T]he rich are always respectable’20 , she wrote while enjoying the comforts of Edward’s large house; and of Francis she joked, ‘he wants nothing but a good Prize [i.e. money paid by the navy for the capture of an enemy vessel] to be a perfect Character.’21
The difference lay partly in the two women’s upbringing: Dorothy with her enterprising Aunt Threlkeld and Jane in her genteel rectory where ladies were expected to enter only theoretically into the work going on in the kitchen. But Dorothy’s attitude would also have been influenced by that break for freedom she had made in her early twenties, the decision to throw in her lot with a not quite respectable brother, a decision to ignore the opinions of others which restricted her life. Flying in the face of family expectations had meant she must accept poverty, and the sense of purpose which she found in supporting William’s vocation added a kind of glamour, or even nobility, to the privations of a cold da
mp house and an unceasing round of housework.
Jane’s itinerant life would not have promoted a sense of purpose. The years after Mr Austen’s death were particularly restless; a relatively small amount of time was spent in temporary lodgings in Bath and there was a lot of travelling about with long visits to Godmersham and Steventon, a holiday in Worthing and a brief stay with the Bridges family at Goodnestone.
In Bath invitations (to tea parties in particular) flowed in from friends and relatives. ‘What request we are in,’ Jane remarked, but she suspected that some of their popularity might arise from pity. ‘I think we are just the kind of people & party to be treated about among our relations; – we cannot be supposed to be very rich.’22
Being ‘treated about’ by her richest relations could, of course, be very pleasant. The ice and French wine of Godmersham were always acceptable, and Jane seems to have entered into family life with some spirit. Her niece Fanny recalled in her diary how, during one visit her aunts and Mrs Austen ‘played at school with us. Aunt Cassandra was Mrs Teachum the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the teacher . . . Grandmama Betty Jones the Pie woman . . . They dressed in character and we had a most delightful day.’23
Though Jane may have enjoyed the game, she would also have known that it was her duty to make herself agreeable. A poor relation – as Fanny Price is at Mansfield Park – she would be expected to be obliging and join in. During her stay in the great house, she was constantly reminded by small things of her poverty in comparison to her relations. The visiting hairdresser charged the lady of the house 5s for his services but from the spinster sisters-in-law he asked only 2/6. ‘He certainly respects either our Youth or our poverty,’ Jane remarked to Cassandra. And then there was the embarrassment of being expected to leave tips for the servants; ‘I cannot afford more than ten shillings for Sackree,’ she lamented24 .
There was no escaping the knowledge that she was a poor relation, and the overall impression of an account of Jane’s life at this time is one of pointless wandering about. The evidence of Jane’s earlier letters suggests that she often became weary of visiting and it is difficult not to conclude that an intelligent woman would have found her life at this time a little humiliating and, ultimately, boring.
However, she seems to have refused one chance of gaining a more settled way of life. During her stay at Goodnestone her sister-in-law’s younger brother, Edward, was very attentive. ‘It is impossible to do justice to the hospitality of his attentions towards me;’ she wrote, ‘he made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account.’25 She was probably as little impressed by this homely mark of affection as Emma Woodhouse is by Robert Martin’s riding about the country to get walnuts for her friend, Harriet, but it seems likely that Edward Bridges was enough in love to propose to her about this time.26 Like Harris Bigg Wither’s it was a very respectable offer, but she does not seem to have hesitated this time in refusing.
Her resolution had been taken against a marriage of convenience and that resolution held, even though she was now as ‘poorly off’ as she had feared to be. It was not marriage which could give her life direction and meaning.
Twenty-Five
Another Exile, Another Homecoming
In October 1806, one of Jane Austen’s brothers did provide her, her mother and her sister with a home, but it seems to have been done more for his own convenience than theirs. Francis, having had some success in his naval career, felt himself able to marry and, as he wrote in his memoir, he ‘fixed his abode at Southampton making one family with his mother and sisters, a plan equally suited to his love of domestic society and the extent of his income which was somewhat restricted.’1
Southampton, conveniently close to the naval base of Portsmouth, was at this time a fashionable resort town, so it would have been considered a suitable place for a family of ladies to settle. It had also been decided that Martha Lloyd, who had recently lost her mother, should join their household. This kind of arrangement seems to have been quite common at the time – spinsters frequently becoming ‘co-tenant with other women, related and unrelated.’2 Sharing a home in this way was certainly economical, but Martha was probably the only friend with whom Jane would have been happy to live.
It was in July that Mrs Austen and her daughters left Bath and Jane, according to her own recollections, experienced ‘happy feelings of Escape’. There was then another period of wandering among friends and relations – to Clifton, Adlestrop, Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire and Steventon, before they finally settled in lodgings in Southampton.
The amount of travelling done by the Austen women is worthy of note. Travelling was expensive, particularly for women who could not cover long distances on horseback and must always be suitably escorted by male relations or servants. In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth observes that, even though Mr Collins and his wife have a ‘comfortable income’, it will not ‘allow of frequent journeys’3. And Dorothy Wordsworth said her greatest ambition as far as wealth went was, ‘the liberty of travelling a little and seeing our Friends without caring for the Cost.’4
Other members of the family must have helped with the cost and the arrangement of the ladies’ incessant travelling about, but at least some of the expense fell on the women themselves. Jane’s account of her own expenditure made up at the end of 1807 includes a sum of £1.2s.3d for ‘a journey’. But Jane herself would have had little choice about making most of these journeys. Mrs Austen was in control; she chose how their limited budget was spent. It is extremely unlikely that Jane welcomed having to constantly move around. It made writing all but impossible and she would probably have rather the money was spent on a quiet, settled life in a home as comfortable as they could afford to make it.
About this time, she expressed a longing very like Dorothy’s for that ideal home in which she could speak her mind freely without censure or ridicule. Writing from Godmersham, she spoke of the ‘pleasures of friendship, of unreserved Conversation, of similarity of Taste & Opinion’5 which she would know with Cassandra and Martha when she returned, and which would make up for the loss of all the luxuries she enjoyed in Edward’s grand house.
However, soon after the family ‘settled’ in Southampton, Cassandra was on the move again – to Godmersham – so when brother James and his wife arrived to spend New Year with them, Jane was responsible for their entertainment. She does not seem to have enjoyed the occasion. ‘When you receive this,’ she wrote to Cassandra in February, ‘our guests will be all gone or going; and I shall be left to the comfortable disposal of my time, to ease of mind from the torments of rice puddings and apple dumplings, and probably to regret that I did not take more pains to please them all.’
The ‘smaller establishment’ of which Henry had spoken so cheerfully, was impacting on Jane’s life; her familiarity with rice puddings and apple dumplings was greater than she had been brought up to consider becoming. And her affection for James’s wife was not growing. ‘Mrs J. Austen has asked me to return with her to Steventon;’ she reported. ‘I need not give my answer.’ Mary would have been an uncongenial companion for her literate sister-in-law. Reporting on their reading aloud of The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox, Jane remarked, ‘I believe [Mrs J Austen] has little pleasure from that or any other book.’ But a greater cause of friction must have been Mary’s tactless lamenting over her and James’s poverty – when they were much better off than her sisters-in-law. ‘Mrs J.A. does not talk much of poverty now,’ remarked Jane ironically, ‘though she has no hope of my brother’s being able to buy another horse next summer.’
Jane seems to have been painfully conscious of being poorer than those around her at this time. This same letter ends with an account of a visit to some new acquaintance in Southampton: ‘They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance.’6
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The house in Southampton into which the family moved in March 1807 was pleasantly situated with an attractive garden running up to the old town walls; but the Austen women were no more inclined to stay still after they took possession of it.
Frank’s wife, Mary, (usually referred to as Mrs F.A. to distinguish her from the other Mary, James’s wife, Mrs J. A.) gave birth to her first child in April, and, soon after, Frank set off on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope. Then the new mother was off to Ramsgate, and in August Mrs Austen and her daughters went to Edward’s big house at Chawton for a month. Most of the first half of 1808 was spent by Jane and Cassandra moving between Steventon, Manydown and Kintbury. In May Jane went with Henry to London and in mid-June her mother joined her there and they travelled to Godmersham, not returning to Southampton until 7th July. Of the sixteen months they had (nominally) been occupying the house in Castle Square, Southampton, Jane had actually lived there for, perhaps, eight.
Cassandra went to Godmersham when Jane left. Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, was about to have her eleventh baby and she seems to have particularly valued Cassandra’s help on these occasions – unless Cassandra always put herself forward to save Jane from having to bear her company.
Jane’s letters to her sister at this time reveal that their residence in Southampton was not expected to last. The arrangement of sharing a home with Frank and his wife does not seem to have been working out very well now that his family was growing (Mrs F.A. was pregnant again); and it may be that Mrs Austen felt unable to accept his £50 a year now that he had a wife and children to support.7
As Dorothy was finding up in Westmorland, a growing family of children can make a home feel very crowded indeed.
Jane and Dorothy Page 31