The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  Charles and Fanny were in a dilemma as their eldest daughter had been suffering badly from seasickness. Cassandra Austen had offered to babysit her for the winter, but the devoted couple could not bear to leave her. By 1814, Fanny was expecting a fourth baby. Jane heard that she was ‘safe in bed with a Girl – It happened on Board, a fortnight before it was expected’ (the use of the word ‘safe’ is a reminder of the danger of childbirth), but tragically Fanny died and the baby followed two weeks later.

  Cassandra relayed the news to her old aunt Elizabeth Leigh, who recorded in her diary: ‘The Austin family have a great loss in the attach’d and beloved wife of Captn. C: Austin; who died (by a mistake) on board a Ship from whence she ought sooner to have been removed.’43 Charles had no choice but to send his three bereaved little girls to be looked after by their Palmer grandparents and their aunt Harriet in Bloomsbury. His diary recorded his deep sense of loss: he ‘dreamed of my ever lamented dearest Fanny’.44 Another dream brought back the memory of playing with his dear little daughter Harriet in her bed, as he had often done ‘in happier days’.45 Still grieving, and still away at sea over a year later, he comforted himself by reading Emma, which ‘arrived in time to a moment’: ‘I am delighted with her, more so than even with my favourite Pride and Prejudice.’46 He reread it three times on a long voyage home. Charles later found comfort by marrying his wife’s sister Harriet.

  Cassandra Austen

  The highest praise from Jane Austen was when she described her niece Fanny Knight as ‘almost another sister’ – the ‘almost’ is important. No one could be as important as Cassandra. The family agreed that in the aftermath of Tom Fowle’s death the sisters, always close, drew even closer. ‘They seemed to lead a life to themselves, within the general family life, which was shared only by each other,’ wrote a perceptive great-niece. ‘I will not say their true but their full feelings and opinions were known only to themselves. They alone fully understood what each had suffered and felt and thought.’47

  From the start of her career, Jane Austen wrote about sisters. ‘I would refuse him at once if I were certain that neither of my Sisters would accept him,’ says one of ‘The Three Sisters’ in Volume the First. ‘I am now going to murder my sister,’ announces the narrator of ‘A Letter from a Young Lady’ among the ‘Scraps’ in Volume the Second.48 It is highly significant that it was during Cassandra’s engagement to Tom Fowle that Jane Austen began drafting what became her first two published novels. Both were about pairs of sisters. One of them certainly and the other quite possibly took the form of letters: ‘Elinor and Marianne’, probably begun in 1795, was an epistolary novel in the manner of Richardson’s Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison and Burney’s Evelina. ‘First Impressions’, probably begun the following year, may also have been epistolary.

  Cassandra played her own part in encouraging Jane in her ambition to become a published author. She was Jane’s first reader and she knew ‘First Impressions’ well. Anna Austen, who lived at the parsonage at Dean, near Steventon, recalled her aunt reading from the manuscript of ‘First Impressions’ while she was in the room and, as a very small child, not expected to listen: ‘Listen however I did, with so much interest, and with so much talk afterwards about “Jane and Elizabeth” that it was resolved for prudence’s sake, to read no more of the story in my hearing.’49 In 1799, Jane wrote to Cassandra, ‘I do not wonder at your wanting to read first impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, and that so long ago.’50 The idea of her only having ‘seldom’ read it is clearly a joke: she followed her sister’s progress every inch of the way.

  Jane Austen was one of the first novelists to write about pairs of sisters. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, we are given pairs of sisters whose relationship to one another matters as much as their interest in a romantic match (there was a long tradition in both drama and fiction of contrasting a lively lady with a rational female figure, but they were often friends rather than sisters). Readers have accordingly been tempted to draw parallels between the sisters in the novels and Cassandra and Jane Austen. Invariably it is the younger sisters, such as Elizabeth Bennet and Marianne Dashwood, who are portrayed saying shocking things to their elder sisters, provoking both their outrage and their laughter. This seems very like Jane in her letters to Cassandra.

  So it is that the wiser, calmer, exquisitely well-mannered and more cautious elder sisters have been compared to Cassandra. Is not Elinor Dashwood fond of drawing, as Cassandra was? Does not the younger and more tempestuous Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility share her love of music and novels with her creator, the younger sister Jane? And in Pride and Prejudice could it be a deliberately witty touch to have given the name Jane Bennet to an elder sister resembling Cassandra when Jane herself had a worldview closer to that of the younger sibling? Elizabeth Bennet’s view of the world is far more jaded, and she is not unlike her father in making jokes to cover her natural cynicism: ‘There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.’51 That is very much the sort of thing Jane Austen might have said herself in one of her letters.

  The Victorian family record comments on the difference between the two sisters: ‘They were not exactly alike. Cassandra’s was the colder and calmer disposition; she was always prudent and well judging, but with less outward demonstration of feeling and less sunniness of temper than Jane possessed.’52 ‘Prudent and well judging’ Cassandra might have been, but it is erroneous to believe that she was somehow less passionate than her sister. Her decision to remain a spinster after the death of her fiancé was deeply romantic.

  In Sense and Sensibility, Austen depicts three pairs of sisters, the Dashwoods, the Steeles and the Jenningses. Her portrayal of all three pairs reflects upon her theme of reason versus passion. One of the ideas that she was interested in was how people in the same situation act in very different ways. Thus, Marianne and Elinor are both depicted suffering from a broken heart. Elinor shows fortitude and selflessness in her silent suffering, while Marianne freely indulges in her grief.

  One of the questions that the novel asks is whether it is possible to have a second attachment. Marianne’s belief is that you can only love once, but she is forced to reassess her views, when she does fall in love for the second time:

  Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims. She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another! – and that other, a man who had suffered no less than herself under the event of a former attachment, whom, two years before, she had considered too old to be married, – and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat!53

  Jane Austen, contrary to what people might expect, was firmly not of the belief that there is only one person in the world whom you can love. She said as much to her niece Fanny Knight when she was advising her on matters of the heart, telling her that her only mistake was to believe that first love is real love. ‘Oh! dear Fanny, Your mistake has been one that thousands of women fall into. He was the first young Man who attached himself to you. That was the charm, and most powerful it is.’ As she then goes on to say, ‘it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments [in love] kill anybody’.54

  Yet in Sense and Sensibility disappointment in love very nearly does kill someone. Marianne Dashwood, beautiful, passionate, trusting, has her heart broken in the most callous way. There is no other such raw depiction of grief in any of the novels. Marianne almost dies as a result. But her selfdiscovery includes the realization that she has harmed herself and her
beloved sister:

  Had I died, – it would have been self-destruction. I did not know my danger till the danger was removed; but with such feelings as these reflections gave me, I wonder at my recovery, – wonder that the very eagerness of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God, and to you all, did not kill me at once. Had I died, – in what peculiar misery should I have left you, my nurse, my friend, my sister! – You, who had seen all the fretful selfishness of my latter days; who had known all the murmurings of my heart! – How should I have lived in your remembrance!55

  Despite Cassandra’s ‘Elinor-like fortitude’, when it came to her feelings about love and the impossibility of finding a second attachment, she is closer to the ‘sensibility’ of Marianne than to the ‘sense’ of Elinor.

  The scant evidence that can be drawn regarding Cassandra Austen suggests her deeply romantic nature. Her refusal to entertain another man after Tom Fowle shows that she could never replace him. Jane Austen wrote in Persuasion: ‘How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been, – how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence! – She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.’56 After her sister’s death, Cassandra wrote beside this in her own copy of the novel: ‘Dear dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.’57 To judge from this, Cassandra, not Jane, was the romantic.

  A few years after Jane’s death, Cassandra Austen risked censure from the family by supporting a romantic attachment between her nephew Edward Knight and his sister Fanny’s stepdaughter. Fanny Knight had made an excellent match to Sir Edward Knatchbull, who was a widower with six children. (Their London residence was a fine townhouse in Great George Street, where Lord Byron’s body lay on the night before his funeral that brought the streets of London to a standstill.) In 1826 Edward Knight, Fanny’s brother, eloped to Gretna Green in the middle of the night with her stepdaughter, Mary Knatchbull. Thus Fanny was sister-in-law and stepmother to the same woman. Edward Knight, Jane Austen’s brother who had been adopted and had inherited a fortune, had always been the lucky one. But now he was distraught: the shocking elopement, he wrote, had ‘thrown

  us all into a sad state of agitation and distress’.58 The Knights and the Knatchbulls were horrified by the match, considering it to be an incestuous union, but Cassandra supported the young lovers. She kindly offered to ‘receive the fugitives’ at Chawton.59

  It can hardly be a coincidence that Jane Austen returned to ‘Elinor and Marianne’, the original version of Sense and Sensibility, soon after Cassandra’s loss of her great and only love. Was the revised version, eventually published in 1811, both a love letter from Jane to Cassandra – a way of sharing the pain of her broken heart – and a gentle rebuke, a way of suggesting that it was possible to find true love again, that falling in love is something that can happen more than once?

  Anna Austen wrote movingly of the sisters’ strong bond in her memoir, and paints a memorable picture of them walking in the muddy roads of Steventon in pattens (outdoor shoes), wearing identical bonnets, ‘precisely alike in colour, shape and material’, and being referred to by their father as ‘the girls’, though they were in fact women.60 Jane, with more precision, jokingly gave herself and Cassandra the moniker ‘the formidables’. Anna wrote that, ‘Their affection for each other was extreme; it passed the common love of sisters; and it had been so from childhood.’61 But the true indicator of the strength of their attachment is in Cassandra’s own words, written after her sister’s death, when she had indeed been to Jane ‘my nurse, my friend, my sister’: ‘I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed, – She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself.’62

  6

  The Barouche

  The barouche, illustrated here in one of a series of engravings of carriages published by Rudolph Ackermann in 1816, was a very upmarket set of wheels, pretty much the equivalent of a modern convertible. Four-wheeled and shallow, its seats were arranged vis-à-vis, so that the passengers on the front seat faced those on the back. It had a soft collapsible half-hood that folded like a bellows over the back seat. There was a high outside box seat in front for the driver. The entire carriage was suspended on C-springs. It was drawn by a pair of high-quality horses and was used principally for leisure driving in the summer. This particular model is a ‘high-perch sociable’, very fashionable and rather dangerous. Maria Edgeworth’s father spoke with horror of the reckless height to which perches had ascended by 1817. ‘Carriages’, he wrote, ‘have arisen to a preposterous elevation. That private phaetons and barouches should be mounted out of the town dust, and above the country hedges, is a dangerous luxury.’1

  ‘Mr Clifford lived at Bath; and having never seen London, set off one Monday morning determined to feast his eyes with a sight of that great Metropolis.’ So writes the young Jane Austen in a story in Volume the First called ‘The Memoirs of Mr Clifford’. She continues, ‘He travelled in his Coach and Four, for he was a very rich young Man and kept a great many Carriages of which I do not recollect half. I can only remember that he had a Coach, a Chariot, a Chaise, a Landeau, a Landeaulet, a Phaeton, a Gig, a Whiskey, an Italian Chair, a Buggy, a Curricle and a wheelbarrow.’2 The The Barouche passage is notable not only for coming to a climax with a bump, and for being one of the first moments when Austen experiments with the intervention of a first-person authorial voice, but also because it reveals her knowledge of the many varieties of road transport vehicles available in the late Georgian era.

  In the popular imagination, Jane Austen spent nearly all her life sitting in a parsonage, working on her embroidery, gossiping about the neighbours and writing novels confined to ‘three or four families in a country village’. But two of her novels are set predominantly in the fashionable city of Bath, where she lived for several years herself. Another is set in a newly peopled seaside resort, the kind of place where she loved to spend her summer holidays. Throughout the body of her fiction there are frequent trips to London – whether by Mr Clifford feasting his eyes on the great metropolis, Frank Churchill allegedly going up to town for a haircut, or Darcy visiting Elizabeth’s city relatives in order to sort out the indelicate problem of Lydia. And even in the ‘country’ novels, there are frequent expeditions by road to tourist sites near and far (Blaize Castle, Box Hill, the Derbyshire Peak District).

  It should not therefore come as a surprise that Austen herself was a very well-travelled woman. In thinking about the forces that shaped her imagination, we should add to her family and her books her experience of the road and of different places. By the time she was ten, she had lived in Reading, Oxford and Southampton. When she was twelve she visited Sevenoaks in Kent, travelling back via London. In later years, we can track her to a house in Goodnestone, also in Kent, but much further east, indeed at the extreme east of southern England. She went into the heart of England, to Adlestrop in Gloucestershire and Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. In 1806 she travelled across the River Trent, the traditional dividing line between north and south: she stayed for over a month in Staffordshire, some 150 miles north of her old family home. According to her nieces, she even went as far as the coast of mid-Wales, 250 miles and in both landscape and custom a world away from the southern shires. She was quite familiar with town and city life, moving with ease from the naval hub of Portsmouth to the spa of Bath to the seaside resorts of the west country to what her contemporary William Cobbett called the ‘great wen’ of London itself. She was often away from home for months at a time.

  At the age of sixteen her travels began in earnest. It was then that her brother Edward wed and began his married life at his elegant brick house called Rowling in the village of Goodne
stone in a remote location between Canterbury and Sandwich in Kent. She frequently visited him there and later at his home in Godmersham, halfway between Canterbury and Ashford. Accompanied by a male sibling, she would make London her overnight stop-off on the journey from Hampshire to Kent, usually taking in a theatre visit in the capital. In 1798, 1802, 1803, 1805, 1808, 1809 and 1813, Jane Austen spent lengthy periods at Godmersham, as well as two summer vacations at nearby Rowling. Her letters often give details of travel arrangements. In 1813 she writes of travelling to London with her nieces by coach. The journey took twelve hours: ‘the first three stages for 1s – 6d … all 4 within, which was a little crowd’.3

  Travel was time-consuming, costly and uncomfortable. Ninety per cent of the population never set foot more than a few miles from their own community. But Jane Austen, with her large and widely scattered family, was a good and experienced traveller. The introduction of the turnpike system led to greatly improved roads. Unlike her mother, she did not suffer from travel sickness. She positively enjoyed being away from home. She did not go abroad, because throughout her adult life England was at war with France and there were severe restrictions on continental travel. But she participated in the boom in domestic tourism. Like others of her class, she started taking holidays – usually by the seaside, once close to the mountains of the Peak District.

  Jane used her brother’s carriages but she also travelled by stage-coach, the equivalent of modern public transport. Journeys were undertaken in ‘stages’ of ten to fifteen miles after which the horses would be changed, the length of each day’s journey being determined by the hours of daylight. This was the cheapest way to travel long-distance. Different rates were charged for seats inside or outside the coach – the expression ‘to drop off’, to fall asleep, once had a very literal meaning. At the time of Jane Austen’s birth there were four hundred registered stage-coaches on the road. They could carry up to eighteen passengers at up to eight miles per hour. It was also possible to travel, either inside or out, in a mail coach, where mailbags would be piled on the roof and luggage was carried in receptacles called boots. The Royal Mail stage-coach, introduced in 1784, hastened the improvement of the road system in the British Isles. As well as facilitating the art of letter-writing, which was so central to Jane Austen’s life and the fiction of her time, it was one of the fastest ways to travel.