The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  The gossip raged, fuelled by a jealous secretary of Clive’s called Jenny Strachey. Lord Clive himself wrote to his wife, demanding that she dissociate herself from her fellow-traveller on the fishing fleet: ‘In no circumstance whatever keep company with Mrs Hancock for it is beyond a doubt that she abandoned herself to Mr Hastings.’12

  Warren Hastings remained profoundly loyal to Phila and her little girl, who quickly became known as Betsy. He settled a fortune of five thousand pounds on the child, later doubling the amount, giving her more than enough for a dowry to enable her to make a good marriage. The source of the money was a bond for forty thousand rupees made over to Hastings to be paid in China, which he then passed over to Eliza in English money. Sums of that kind coming from the India–China connection at this period always carry the smell of opium.

  Hastings was famously generous and well known for his love of children, but his private letters to Phila are unusually affectionate and revealing: ‘Kiss my dear Bessy for me, and assure her of my tenderest Affection. May the God of Goodness bless you both.’13 Whether or not Hastings was Eliza’s natural father, she always treated him like one. When she married her cousin Henry in 1797, she wrote at once to Hastings, seeking his approbation of the union. After Eliza’s death, Henry visited Hastings. Reporting on the visit, Jane Austen wrote, somewhat mysteriously, that he had ‘never hinted at Eliza in the smallest degree’.14 She was clearly astonished that Hastings had said nothing about the last days of the child he had so adored. It may well be inferred that the relationship was so close, his pain so great, that he could not bear to speak of her.

  In the summer of 1765, the Hancock family arrived back in England, accompanied by Warren Hastings and their maid Clarinda. It was reported that the first news he heard on his arrival was word from the Austens of the death of his son. He was deeply affected, his love for his god-daughter Eliza only intensified. In London, Hastings and the Hancocks rented houses close to one another. Eliza and her mother stayed on in England when Hancock returned to Bengal. He sent them wonderful supplies: spices for cooking, curry leaves, pickled mangoes and limes, chillies, balychong spice and cassoondy sauce. Perfumes, such as attar of roses from Patna, arrived too. Diamonds were sent worth thousands of pounds, and gold mohurs (coins). He also shipped over fine linen and silks for bed linen and for dresses for both mother and daughter. They received seersucker, sannow, doreas, muslin, dimity, Malda silks, chintz and flowered shawls. In return, Phila sent books, gin and newspapers. Hancock requested that his wife share her treasures with members of her family, including of course George Austen and his family, which by this time was growing rapidly. Little wonder that Jane Austen’s juvenile writing contains references to consumer goods such as Indian muslins, not to mention curry sauces.15

  Hancock wrote vivid letters to his wife, telling terrifying tales of servants killed by tigers in the Sunderbunds and reporting that her two maids, Diana and Silima, had become prostitutes. Phila shared this Indian news with Jane Austen’s parents. She often visited Hampshire to help Mrs Austen in her confinements. She was definitely present at Cassandra’s birth and probably at Jane’s in 1775.

  Warren Hastings met George Austen in London in July 1765. Austen was extremely impressed with Hastings, who had been a brilliant classicist at Westminster School and had always been disappointed that instead of proceeding to university he had been sent out to the East India Company as a young man. Hastings loved Latin poetry and had a taste for writing verse based on the Horatian model. George Austen urged his own children to emulate the great man’s learning.

  Eliza’s parents wanted her to be educated in England or France. She was given the best London masters for drawing and dancing lessons, and for music. She played the guitar and the harpsichord. She was taught to ride, to play-act and to speak French. This was a typical education in female accomplishments with the express purpose of attracting a man of means. But Hancock also insisted that she had arithmetic and writing lessons: ‘her other Accomplishments will be Ornaments to her, but these are absolutely necessary’.16 He took advice on her education from Hastings, who urged ‘an early practice in Economy’, but also hinted that he would provide for Eliza: ‘but if I live and meet with the success which I have the Right to hope for, she shall not be under the Necessity of marrying a Tradesman, or any Man for her Support’.17 Hancock fretted about his daughter. He worried about her moral health, fearing that she might ‘pick up the Levity or Follies of the French’, and also about her physical health – when she got threadworms he noted that ‘they cannot be watched with too much Caution, as they may be greatly detrimental to her Constitution’.18

  After Hancock’s death, alone in India in 1775, still trying and failing to make money, Eliza and her mother stayed in London another year. Then they began their travels in Europe, first going to Germany and Belgium, before reaching Paris in 1779. By 1780 Eliza had seen the French royal family at close quarters in Versailles, taken up the harp and sat for her ivory miniature. It was a present for her beloved uncle George Austen, dispatched to his rectory. She is wearing a pretty low-cut dress, adorned with blue ribbons, and her hair is heavily powdered, as was the fashion in Paris (‘Heads in general look as if they had been dipped in a meal tub,’ she wrote in a letter).19

  Jane Austen was five when the miniature reached Steventon. A year later Eliza became engaged to a captain in Marie-Antoinette’s regiment of dragoons, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide. Ten years older than Eliza, he was the son of a provincial lawyer – though he called himself the Comte de Feuillide, on somewhat dubious grounds. George Austen thoroughly disapproved of the match, fearing that the self-styled Count was a fortunehunter and complaining that Eliza and her mother were giving up their friends, their country and even their religion.20

  In December 1773, Hancock had drawn up letters of attorney enabling George Austen to act on his sister’s behalf in the confidential handling of receipts from India. Invoices for assignments of diamonds were made out in George Austen’s name. Hastings and Hancock were also involved in trading opium, among other commodities. It is startling to suppose that Jane Austen’s education and the books in her father’s library, which did so much to inspire her to become a writer, may well have been funded, at least indirectly, by the opium trade. So much for the notion of her family being wholly sequestered from the world in a cosy Hampshire village.

  Hancock’s death, back in Calcutta in 1775, was the occasion for Warren Hastings’s doubling of his gift to his god-daughter Eliza. George Austen was one of the trustees named in the legal documents. It was just two months after Hancock’s death that Jane Austen was born.

  Cecilia Wynne in the early novella ‘Catharine’ is the only young woman in Austen’s fiction to join the fishing fleet to seek marriage in India. But her family connections with Bengal periodically pop up in the mature novels. Lady Bertram’s request for an East Indian shawl is one example. And in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne and Willoughby make fun of Brandon’s experience there: ‘“he has told you that in the East Indies the climate is hot, and the mosquitoes are troublesome” … “Perhaps,” said Willoughby, “his observations may have extended to the existence of nabobs, gold mohrs and palanquins.”’21 Jane Austen never based her stories directly on her own family’s experiences, but in a life dominated by conversation, the exchange of family news, storytelling and letter-writing, it seems more than a little coincidental that the reason Brandon asks his regiment for a transfer to Bengal is his desire to escape from the heartbreak of losing his great love, who is called Eliza. She is forced to marry his brother, against her will, and later becomes a prostitute; her daughter, also called Eliza, is seduced by Willoughby when only sixteen, has his child and is abandoned. For Jane Austen, it would seem, the name of Eliza was inextricably connected with both the East Indies and sexual scandal.

  Eliza

  Eliza Hancock, now the Comtesse de Feuillide and bringing with her a baby boy, burst into the life of the Steventon parsonage just in
time for the Christmas festivities of 1786. Slight of build and extremely elegant, she had high cheekbones, elfin features, large expressive eyes and masses of curly hair. Marriage had not tamed the vivacious Eliza. She had plenty of admirers at Steventon, male and female. Jane Austen, at the impressionable age of eleven, was simply enchanted by the cousin who brought tales of India and Europe to rural Hampshire.

  For the young Jane Austen, Eliza Hancock was the living incarnation of her favourite character in one of her favourite novels: Charlotte Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Reading Eliza’s real letters is like reading Charlotte’s fictional ones. Temperamentally, Eliza was unsuited to marriage, which she saw as giving up ‘dear Liberty and yet dearer flirtation’. ‘Flirtation’s a charming thing,’ she wrote: ‘it makes the blood circulate!’ Of her first husband, the Count, she remarked, ‘it is too little to say he loves, since he literally adores me’. Of weddings she quipped, ‘I was never but at one wedding in my life and that appeared a very stupid idea to me.’ Of herself she wrote, ‘independence and the homage of half a dozen are preferable to subjection and the attachment of a single individual … I am more and more convinced that She is not at all calculated for sober Matrimony.’22

  Her liveliness mesmerized the Austens. She played piano for them every day, and arranged impromptu dances in the parlour. She told stories of Paris and of Marie Antoinette. She complained of French theatre that ‘it is still the fashion to translate or rather murder, Shakespear’.23 She gave Jane for her birthday a twelve-volume set of Arnaud de Berquin’s stories L’Ami des enfants.

  Jane and Cassandra, who had been at boarding school for the previous eighteen months, were now home for good. In Steventon rectory Eliza also encountered Henry Austen, no longer a child but a tall handsome man about to go up to Oxford. He soon made a point of visiting her when she went back to London, and arranging for her to visit him at college. At St John’s in Oxford, Eliza ‘longed to be a Fellow that I might walk [in the garden] every day’. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I was delighted with the Black Gown and thought the Square Cap mighty becoming.’24

  Eliza had confessed to Philadelphia (‘Phylly’) Walter, cousin to the Austens, that she was no longer in love with her husband. While he was in France she led, according to this cousin, a ‘very dissipated life’ in London.25 To judge from Eliza’s surviving letters, her life was full of socializing and adventure. She narrowly misses being robbed and attacked by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath. She takes her little boy Hastings to Hastings and other seaside resorts for the benefit of sea-bathing. She attends balls and the opera and moves back and forth between England and France.

  Following the success of her visit to Steventon in 1786 she was keen to go down to Hampshire again, though her uncle had told her that he was able to entertain only at midsummer and Christmas. She made plans to return to Steventon for the following Christmas and she encouraged her cousins in their plans to put on private theatricals. As will be seen, Eliza led the way in choosing the plays and it is no surprise that those she chose featured spirited heroines who refuse to be cowed by men.

  Both James and Henry Austen were ‘fascinated’ by the flirtatious Eliza, according to James’s son, who wrote the first memoir of Jane. One of Jane Austen’s comic stories written before the end of the 1780s was called ‘Henry and Eliza’. Eliza is a beautiful little foundling girl discovered in a ‘Haycock’, rather as Austen’s cousin was a beautiful little girl of uncertain origin called Eliza Hancock. The action turns on an elopement by the titular characters, who run off to France leaving only a curt note: ‘Madam, we are married and gone.’ With the real Eliza anything could happen and the young Jane Austen seems to have found it both exciting and amusing to imagine her eloping with Henry. Little did she know how the story of the real Eliza and Henry would end.

  Eliza returned to Steventon in the summer of 1792, in much darker circumstances. She brought with her a fund of true tales as shocking as anything in the Gothic novels that young women were devouring at the time. Eliza, her mother and little Hastings had fled from France as trouble brewed in the months leading up to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. They were in London when news of the revolution broke. From then on, they were forced to stay in England.

  By January 1791 Eliza’s husband Jean-François, now no doubt regretting his title of ‘Comte’, had fled to Turin with the King’s brother and other royalist émigrés. Eliza wrote from London to the Austen family at Steventon telling them the news and also giving bulletins of her mother’s declining health. She comforted herself with gossip about her Steventon cousins, especially Jane and Cassandra: ‘I hear they are perfect beauties and of course gain hearts by dozens.’26

  After a long battle with breast cancer, Phila Hancock died in 1792. Eliza’s husband managed, via a circuitous route, to join her in England to provide some comfort in her bereavement. They went to Bath for a period of recuperation and she became pregnant. The Count decided, however, to return to France for fear of having his land confiscated. As Eliza reported,

  M. de F proposed remaining here some time, but he soon received Accounts from France which informed him that having already exceeded his Leave of Absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently his whole property forfeited to the Nation. Such Advices were not to be neglected and M. de F was obliged to depart for Paris.27

  Within days of his departure, Eliza’s nerves, already frayed, were shattered when she was caught up in serious riots in London. On 4 June 1792, the King’s birthday, a group of forty servants had been invited to a dance and dinner at a pub, the Pitts Head. There was no disturbance until the High Constable of Westminster along with his watchmen entered the pub, made trouble and arrested all the servants, taking them to the Watchhouse in Mount Street. The next morning a mob arrived at the Watchhouse and soldiers were called to read the Riot Act. Eliza’s coach was attacked and her driver was injured, terrifying her out of her wits and causing her to miscarry the baby she had conceived on her husband’s visit to England. She wrote a graphic account of the events:

  The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the guards, the fragments of bricks and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my Coachman, the firing at one end of the street which was already begun, altogether in short alarmed me so much, that I really have never been well since. The Confusion continued all that day and Night and the following Day, and for these eight and forty Hours, I have seen nothing but large parties of Soldiers parading up and down in this Street, to which Mount Street is very near, there being only Grosvenor Square between. My apprehensions have been that they would have set fire to the houses they were so bent on demolishing, and think if that was to be the case how soon in such a City as this a Fire very trifling in the beginning might be productive of the most serious Consequences.28

  Parallels were instantly drawn with recent history in France. A caricature of the Mount Street riots, published two days later, showed a French manservant arguing with a violent watchman and saying ‘Ah, Sacre Dieu! I did tink it vas all Dance in de land of Liberté!’ On the back wall is a print of the Storming of the Bastille, with cannons and decapitated heads on pikes. The implication is clear: like Paris, London was in danger of being swept into revolution.29

  Eliza immediately made plans to escape to Steventon. But as a result of her miscarriage and then a severe case of chickenpox, she didn’t get there until August. So it was that she arrived at the Austen rectory with her head full of English riots and anxieties about her husband back in Paris. Weakened by miscarriage and illness, she cried when she saw the uncle whose features so resembled those of the beloved mother whom she had recently lost.

  She noted how tall her cousin Jane had grown and assured Phylly Walter, who disliked Jane, that she ‘was greatly improved in manners as in person’. Eliza also expressed her own sense of loyalty to the younger sister: ‘My Heart gives the preference to
Jane, whose kind partiality to me, indeed requires a return of the same nature.’30

  She may have felt safe in rural Hampshire, sharing stories and books with her cousins, but news from France reached her in private letters from Jean-François and also via the English press: ‘My private Letters confirm the Intelligence afforded by the public Prints,’ she wrote to Phylly Walter, ‘and assure me that nothing we read there is exaggerated.’31 She was referring to the September Massacres, that wave of mob violence which began with the storming of the Tuileries Palace and culminated in the massacre of fourteen thousand people, including priests, political prisoners, women and children as young as eight. William Wordsworth would witness the aftermath as he passed through Paris soon afterwards. The unthinkable had happened: France abolished its monarchy and formally established the Republic.

  The atrocities were reported in gruesome detail in the English press. The royal family were imprisoned and the London papers focused on the fate of the Queen’s friend, the Princess de Lamballe. On 3 September she was killed by the mob, decapitated, her innards and her head carried away on pikes. The head was taken to a barber who dressed the hair with its striking blonde curls so as to render it instantly recognizable to Marie Antoinette when it bobbed up and down outside the window where she was incarcerated. Caricatures of decapitated heads being carried along the streets of Paris on pikes filled the windows of the London print shops.