Left alone again with her thoughts nearly two years later, she would still write fretfully, ‘I will be busy,’ seeking an escape from introspection, leaving her feelings about her separation from William unresolved.
In her journal Dorothy perfected a form of expression which exposed the power of her emotions but which, almost compulsively, concealed their cause. Perhaps this was an expression of that inner conflict which De Quincey detected. His account suggests that this style was not confined to the words on her page, but characterised her outward appearance and behaviour.
The picture he paints of the mature Dorothy is of an emotionally vital woman full of ‘organic sensibility’, a busy woman, yet one who was delightfully attentive to the conversation of her friends. He believed that she had ‘humanized [her brother] by the gentler charities’, but he detected in her an intensity which gave her pain. Others also remarked on it. Noting her uneasiness about Coleridge, Mary wrote ‘I wish she would not suffer such things to disturb her so much.’24 and her friend Catherine Clarkson expressed regret when Dorothy’s grief for her brother John’s death lingered on, cutting her off from the usual pleasures of life.
By contrast there is an air of ease and contentment in Jane’s letters once the move to Chawton was decided upon: a comfortable acceptance of her life. She wrote of a ball in Southampton in December 1808: ‘It was the same room in which we danced 15 years ago! – I thought it all over – & inspite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.’25
Once they were settled at Chawton Cottage, the Austen women were no longer in continual motion. Apart from a visit to Manydown, which they made together, Jane and Cassandra stayed at home for the first year. The benefit to Jane of this calm, stationary life is obvious: the rapidity with which she settled to work as soon as it was established, suggests how deeply unpleasant the rootless, wandering years must have been for her.
By 1809, when Dorothy was thirty-seven and Jane thirty-three, we see two unmarried women, apparently living as nineteenth century society expected them to live. But the choices they had made as they grew and matured had, in fact, taken them on widely diverging paths, and ensured that the way in which they would be remembered was very different.
Part Five
Twenty-Six
Beyond 1809
Jane Austen was, of course, destined to become a published and successful writer. Sometime in 1810 or 1811, she offered Sense and Sensibility (again through Henry’s mediation) to the publisher Thomas Egerton, who agreed to publish it ‘on commission’.
‘It was,’ according to her nephew’s Memoir, ‘with extreme difficulty that her friends . . . could prevail on her to publish her first work’.1 But this again may be an attempt to portray Jane as a shy, retiring lady uninterested in earning money. It certainly does not match up with the brisk determination of ‘Mrs Ashton Denis’, taking matters into her own hands and attempting to recover what was her own: attempting to find a way forward for her own career.
Jane’s ‘friends’ (and Austen-Leigh would have included family members in the term) certainly do not seem to have been so urgent or so determined in their attempts to persuade her to publish as to offer much financial backing. ‘On commission’ meant that the author must cover any losses incurred in publication and Jane, ‘actually made a reserve from her very moderate income to meet the expected loss.’ With an income of less than £50 a year such a saving could only have been made with extreme difficulty, and it was perhaps only possible because she had at last come to rest in a proper home; while she was flying about the country, it is unlikely such economy would have been within her power.
The move to Chawton had changed Jane’s life completely. The last remnants of depression lifted; she was able to work purposefully and with concentration. Soon she had begun to revise Pride and Prejudice and, in 1813, it followed Sense and Sensibility out into the world.
Jane was able now to identify herself as a writer – except when she was interrupted by visits from her brothers and her nieces and nephews, bringing with them those demands for Joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb. She enjoyed their visits – and expressed relief when they left. But for Dorothy the very centre of her life was William and his growing family. Her love for the children who soon filled those larger rooms at Allan Bank and the family’s subsequent homes at Grasmere Old Rectory and Rydal Mount, was powerful and often obsessive.
For an unmarried woman in Georgian times the children of her siblings were the closest she would come to motherhood. It was an important relationship, as Jane Austen acknowledged in Emma; these children provided, ‘objects of interest, objects for the affections . . . ’ Emma believes that her nephews and nieces will ‘supply every sort of sensation that declining life can need. There will be enough for every hope and every fear’.2
Jane herself had begun upon the business of being an aunt much earlier in her life than Dorothy. Her eldest niece, Edward’s daughter Fanny, had been born back in January 1793 when Jane was just seventeen years old. The accounts of her nephews and nieces suggest (what is not very apparent in her letters) that she showed them a great deal of affection. ‘[S]he seemed to love you,’ recalled Caroline, ‘and you loved her naturally in return.’3 And, ‘Aunt Jane was the general favourite with children;’ according to her niece Anna, ‘her ways with them being so playful . . . ’4
But, for all this, she would prove, over the years, to be a much more cool, reserved sort of aunt than Dorothy. Aunt Jane was always keenly aware of how quickly children changed; she knew that even the cutest babies could develop in unappealing ways. ‘I shall think with tenderness & delight on his beautiful & smiling Countenance & interesting Manners,’ she wrote of Edward’s third child, George, ‘till a few years have turned him into an ungovernable, ungracious fellow.’5
In this relationship, as in others, Jane would maintain a distance, think rationally and not allow her feelings to overwhelm her.
Dorothy had no such detachment from William’s children; she was completely absorbed in her feelings for little Johnny when he was a baby. ‘I feel deeply every hour of life the riches of the Blessing which God has given us,’ she wrote to Catherine Clarkson, ‘and you who have nursed your own Babe by a cottage fireside know what peace and pleasure, wakefulness and hope there is in attending upon a healthy infant, and that ones thoughts are never tired when so employed.’6
She was, in fact, identifying herself with Mrs Clarkson – seeing herself as a mother. Her closeness to William, her daily contact with the baby and her complete faith in the ‘rightness’ of her own emotional response, perhaps made this inevitable.
This was a line which Jane would never cross; aunts might be important but they were not mothers. She was in agreement with Emma Woodhouse who finishes her reflections on the pleasures of nieces and nephews with this reservation: ‘though my attachment to none can equal that of a parent, it suits my ideas of comfort better than what is warmer and blinder.’ Jane’s assessments of her brothers’ children were neither warm nor blind. ‘Charles is not quite so lovely as he was. Louisa is much as I expected, and Cassandra I find handsomer than I expected,’ she wrote from Godmersham. Of James’s daughter she wrote, ‘Little Caroline looks very plain among her Cousins, & tho’ she is not so headstrong or humoursome as they are, I do not think her at all more engaging.’7 Of Charles’s daughter: ‘I should be very happy in the idea of seeing little Cassy again too, did not I fear she would disappoint me by some immediate disagreeableness.’ 8
Like Emma she seems to have found comfort in detachment. In fact she did not quite approve of Dorothy’s brand of blind enthusiasm for children; even mothers should, in Jane’s opinion, show a little restraint. ‘Harriot’s fondness for her [daughter] seems just what is amiable & natural, & not foolish,’9 she noted with approval. Dorothy’s adoration of Johnny she would certainly have dismissed as ‘foolish’.
Dorothy could make comparisons between the five nieces and nephews with w
hom William and Mary eventually provided her – Johnny, Dora, Thomas, Catharine and Willy. But usually she compared only to mark the superiority of the exceptional Johnny, whose primary hold on her heart was never challenged, even when it became apparent that that ‘noble countenance’ was not linked to a superior intelligence. Little Dora ‘grows very like Johnny,’ she reported when the children were two and four years old respectively, ‘but she is twice as sharp, and when she can talk will utter, I believe, three words for his one.’10 Only two years later she insisted: ‘They are both sweet in their way; but it must be allowed that John is the finer creature’.11
Even when Johnny was twelve years old and his schooling was proving extremely problematic, she insisted, not very coherently, on his innate ability: ‘His understanding is I am sure very good, as far as he does understand; but he is naturally slow . . . ’12 This was certainly a kind of blindness.
Perhaps the more cautious Jane took into account the emotional risks of such absolute devotion.
‘Nephews and nieces, whilst still young and innocent,’ wrote Thomas De Quincey – probably with Dorothy in mind – ‘are as good almost as sons and daughters to a fervid and loving heart that has carried them in her arms from the hour they were born.’ But, ‘after a nephew has grown into a huge bulk of a man, six feet high, and as stout as a bullock . . . he ceases to be an object of any very profound sentiment.’13
Jane Austen – like many other maiden aunts – had carried her nephews in her arms and taken her part in child-care, but, though she made no comment on their size as young men, nor their likeness to bullocks, she did sometimes find the boys’ habits distinctly unappealing as they grew older The privileged sons of Edward repeatedly upset her with their ‘habit[s] of Luxury or some proof of sporting Mania’.14
However, Jane seems to have found great pleasure in the society of her older nieces. She sent long letters of advice on matters of the heart to Fanny, and Anna found ‘in her aunt Jane . . . a sympathy and a companionship which was the delight of her girlhood.’15 Perhaps Jane had in mind the pleasure she took in the company of these young women when she made Emma Woodhouse look forward to a future in which ‘I shall often have a niece with me.’16
Rather alarmingly, the letters of both women begin to display an anxiety about the temperaments of their nieces when the children are still very young. While cleverness – or, perhaps, a ‘noble manliness’ – was looked for in a boy, docility was most highly prized in girls. Jane remarked on the contrasting temperaments of her great-nieces, when both girls were still under three years old: ‘Jemima has a very irritable bad Temper . . . and Julia a very sweet one . . . I hope [their mother] will give Jemima’s disposition the early & steady attention it must require.’17
By the time Dora was four, Dorothy was becoming uneasy about this little girl who was ‘of the dancing brood’18 and ‘all fun and life’.19 She could not but confess that ‘Her faculties are, I think, quicker,’ than John’s. Though she maintained that her favourite ‘has ten times the thought . . . and he is knowing and sensible.’20
Both children were now attending the little school in Grasmere village where John – who probably suffered from some form of dyslexia – struggled to learn to read. His little sister soon overtook him and, to Dorothy’s dismay, Dora was ‘proud and not unwilling to display what she can do’.21 This was definitely not the way in which a little girl ought to behave.
‘A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can’, Jane Austen observes wryly in Northanger Abbey.22 And this was a lesson that was taught harshly to poor little Dora Wordsworth very early in her life. Her aunt determined to conquer her ‘waywardness’, and set about breaking the child’s spirit with punishments and imprisonments. Finally, she persuaded (a reluctant) William that Dora should be sent away to boarding school; and, before the poor child reached her fifth birthday, she was dispatched (alone in a public coach) to the care of a Miss Weir in Appleby, more than thirty miles from Grasmere.
In bringing this about Dorothy was almost certainly driven, in part, by her dislike of seeing Johnny eclipsed by his clever sister, but the arguments she put forward reflect the most conventional of conventional attitudes towards the upbringing of girls. ‘I fear we shall have great difficulty in subduing her,’ she lamented; and the purpose of sending Dora to Miss Weir’s school was that she might become a ‘useful girl in the family’ (my emphasis).23 It might have been Hannah More herself speaking.
Dorothy who had, in her youth, not only valued spontaneity, but had also enjoyed a sense of mental superiority over the Miss Custs, was now an advocate for subjection in a girl, valuing her niece chiefly, not for her intellectual abilities, but for her usefulness to the family. This contradiction, this conflict in Dorothy’s feelings in her middle life, was not only the source of misery to little Dora – who cried bitterly and clung desperately to her father when he visited her in her exile – it also seems to have caused pain to Dorothy herself.
Mansfield Park, the first novel which Jane Austen wrote entirely at Chawton, suggests that she had changed from the nineteen-year-old who had created Marianne Dashwood.
Like Marianne, Fanny Price (the heroine of Mansfield Park) is remarkable for her depth of feeling, yet she is a very different creature. First there is the difference in the way Fanny Price is presented. Much of the story is told from her point of view. We see sensibility from the inside. The reader of Sense and Sensibility is told about Marianne’s behaviour and occasionally the author gives an explanation of that behaviour which is, usually, not very sympathetic – ‘Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby’24. By contrast, the readers of Mansfield Park are privy to its heroine’s joys and sufferings (mostly sufferings), as they follow the narrative of Fanny’s life – her homesickness when she is taken from her parents, her unrequited love for her cousin Edmund, and her uncle’s determination that she should marry her rich suitor Henry Crawford. Fanny’s feelings, her inner life, are given much more weight than those of Jane’s earlier heroines.
This perspective makes it more likely that readers will feel sympathy for, and identify with, Fanny. But she is also a more nuanced and subtly drawn character, one with whom the author herself seems to have more sympathy.
Unlike Marianne, who is rude to others and whose lack of perception makes her indifferent to her sister’s suffering, Fanny’s sensibility does not make her selfish. She has that ability which Jane had specifically denied to her characters in the early burlesque Love and Friendship: the ability to enter imaginatively into the feelings of others.
When her cousin Julia loves and is rebuffed by Henry Crawford, Fanny notices her pain and feels for her. When she hears of her cousin Maria’s adultery Fanny is immediately overwhelmed, not only by her own sense of shame and shock but also by the suffering of everyone else in the family – her aunt, her uncle, her other cousins. She is so anxious about other people’s feelings that she sometimes attributes to others her own extreme sensibilities. When Mary Crawford has been ridiculing the clergy in her conversation with Edmund, only to discover that he is shortly to be ordained, Fanny ‘pitied her. “How distressed she will be at what she said just now,” passed across her mind.’25 In fact, she feels more for Miss Crawford than Miss Crawford feels for herself on the occasion.
Jane was now willing to allow that sensibility was not always selfish and that a being ‘tremblingly alive’ to her own misfortunes (and Fanny Price does a fair amount of trembling) need not be selfishly indifferent to others’ pain.
Like Marianne, Fanny loves and responds to nature, but again there is a striking difference: Fanny not only glories in the natural world, she finds in it a moral tutorship. As she looks out on a starlit night, she declares: ‘I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Natu
re were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.’26 In fact she has discovered those lessons of ‘moral evil and of good’ which William Wordsworth believed could be found in the natural world.
The change in Jane Austen’s voice as she began upon her later novels is arresting.
William Deresiewicz and other academics believe that Jane Austen’s writing – particularly her last three complete novels, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion – displays an awareness of the work of her contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Byron: writers who would, years later, come to be known as ‘the Romantics’.27 Jane mentions reading Walter Scott’s novels in her letters, and Byron’s poetry is mentioned in her unfinished novel Sanditon. It is harder to determine whether she had read anything of Wordsworth’s. But Deresiewicz draws attention to an intriguing little echo.
In the East Room – the former school-room of Mansfield Park to which the Bertrams’ poor relation, Fanny Price, retreats for solace – there are ‘three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland’. This, he believes, may have been meant to call to the reader’s mind William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet whose name was associated with both Tintern Abbey (about which William wrote one of his most popular poems) and the lakes of Cumberland.28
Whether or not Jane had read Wordsworth’s work, Fanny Price is a ‘Romantic’. The spiritual and moral significance which she finds in nature is at the heart of Romanticism, and she is also possessed of a Romantic’s imagination, one which, rather than breeding extravagant fancies, allows an individual to enter into the feelings and experiences of another. These qualities make Fanny very different from Marianne (and Marianne’s forerunners in Love and Friendship).
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