The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  As well as the twice-weekly assemblies and the mid-week Wednesday concert, the theatre held performances on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. In Northanger Abbey, the regulated uniformity of the Bath social circuit is parodied in a dialogue between Catherine and Henry in the Lower Rooms:

  ‘Were you never here before, Madam?’

  ‘Never, sir.’

  ‘Indeed! Have you yet honoured the Upper Rooms?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I was there last Monday.’

  ‘Have you been to the theatre?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I was at the play on Tuesday.’

  ‘To the concert?’

  ‘Yes, sir, on Wednesday.’

  ‘And are you altogether pleased with Bath?’

  ‘Yes – I like it very well.’

  ‘Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again.’39

  When Jane Austen arrived at Bath in May 1801 she attended the penultimate ball of the season. She was surprised that the Assembly Rooms were so quiet, with merely four couples dancing before tea:

  I dressed myself as well as I could, and had all my finery much admired at home. By nine o’clock my Uncle, Aunt and I entered the rooms and linked Miss Winstone on to us. – Before tea, it was rather a dull affair; but then the beforetea did not last long, for there was only one dance, danced by four couple. – Think of four couple, surrounded by about an hundred people, dancing in the upper rooms at Bath! – After tea we cheered up; the breaking up of private parties sent some scores more to the Ball, and tho’ it was shockingly and inhumanly thin for this place, there were people enough I suppose to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies.40

  Nevertheless she enjoyed staring at a distant cousin, the notorious MaryCassandra Twiselton: ‘I am proud to say that I have had a very good eye at an Adulteress’; she was ‘not so pretty as expected’, being indeed somewhat bald and highly rouged.41 Mary-Cassandra had recently been divorced by her husband, always a high-profile affair at the time, since it involved an action in the House of Lords. A maid had testified that Mary-Cassandra had bragged about the sexual prowess of her lover in comparison with that of her husband.

  Jane Austen’s Twiselton cousins certainly had a chequered history: MaryCassandra’s elder brother had eloped to Scotland after forming an unsuitable liaison during some amateur theatricals. The marriage was a disaster and he eventually divorced his wife and became a clergyman. Austen mentioned him in a letter of 1813.

  Austen continued her account of that first ball after her arrival in Bath with an enthusiastic description of her own new white dress. Jane seemed to prefer larger parties: ‘I detest tiny parties – they force one into constant exertion.’42 Catherine Morland is less favourably inclined towards large gatherings. When she attends her first assembly, she is shocked to find Mr Allen heading off for the card room, leaving the ladies to negotiate their way through the throng of young men by the door. So crowded is the room that she can only glimpse the high feathers of the ladies.

  Austen’s first Bath novel depicts a city of amusement, sociability and pleasure, though it can of course also be painful and humiliating if the social codes are misunderstood. Catherine’s innocent breaches of propriety do cause her distress, as do broken engagements and the absence of a dancing partner at a ball. Like the teenager that she is, Catherine oscillates between extreme happiness and despair; one minute her ‘spirits danced within her, as she danced in her chair all the way home’, the next she experiences the ‘heart-rending tidings’ that the Tilneys have called on her only to discover that she has gone out driving with John Thorpe.43 That night she cries herself to sleep. Austen’s ironic third-person narration maintains the necessary distance from her heroine, but she is never callous about how seemingly trivial things matter to the feelings of a young girl. She is much harsher towards characters who, in her phrase, tell lies to increase their importance, or manipulate others for their own ends, regardless of everything but their own gratification. Catherine’s entrance into society is an education in growing up, as it was for her literary predecessor, Fanny Burney’s Evelina.

  Jane Austen was well aware of Bath’s reputation as a marriage market. In Emma Mrs Elton tells Emma, ‘And as to its recommendations to you, I fancy I need not take much pains to dwell on them. The advantages of Bath to the young are pretty well understood.’44 In Northanger Abbey, the spa town fulfils its reputation as a place devoted to the pursuit of social and sexual liaison. Isabella hooks Frederick Tilney by playing him off against Catherine’s brother. Henry Tilney’s affection for Catherine ‘originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought’. For Catherine Bath is a city of pleasure, where she finds a husband in the first man she dances with: ‘Here are a variety of amusements, a variety of things to be seen and done all day long, which I can know nothing of there … I really believe I shall always be talking of Bath … I do like it so very much … Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?’45

  If ‘Susan’, as it then was, had been published in 1803, the first words of the published Jane Austen46 would have established her from the very start as someone different from the run-of-the-mill lady novelists whose sentimental romances and melodramatic Gothic tales filled the shelves of the circulating libraries: ‘No one who had ever seen Susan Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.’ Susan was later renamed Catherine because of the publication in 1809 of a novel by another anonymous lady with the title Susan. Catherine Morland is a plain child, with a ‘thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark, lank hair, and strong features’.47 But it is her very ordinariness that is the point. Jane Austen makes her readers interested in a very unremarkable girl who grows up in the course of the novel.

  Catherine learns the folly of expecting ‘real-life’ to be the same as events in novels. Her imagination leads her to think that General Tilney has murdered his wife and she is rebuked by the hero in a very striking passage: ‘consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.’48

  But Catherine is right and Henry is wrong. Catherine’s distrust of the General is justified when he turns her out of the house, forcing her to endure that long coach journey of seventy miles alone. Austen’s novel reveals a paradoxical doubleness beloved of the author: the novel-reading heroine, contrary to expectation, does learn about life from reading books: ‘Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.’49

  Ultimately, Jane Austen had mixed feelings about Bath – as most of us do about the cities in which we live. But it inspired two remarkable novels. She took advantage of all that this vibrant environment could offer and it was here that she thought she would see the first of her books in print. But it would also be the place where she suffered her greatest loss.

  10

  The Marriage Banns

  St Nicholas’s, Steventon, the thirteenth-century church where Jane worshipped until the family left for Bath, stands almost unchanged from the time when the Austen family made their way by foot to Sunday services. The path ascended the steep hill behind the parsonage. It was flanked by hedgerows, giving shelter to primroses in the spring and anemones in May and June. The church was set apart, flanked by sycamore trees. An ancient yew hung over the north-west corner. The main change to the modest stone-built grey church between Austen’s time and ours was the addition of a needle spire in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  In the church, there are now memorial tablets to James Austen, Jane’s eldest brother, who took over the parish from her father, to his two wives and to some of his
relations. Their graves are in the churchyard. Austen herself is commemorated on the north wall of the nave with a bronze plaque which simply states her dates and the fact that she worshipped at the church. There is also a reproduction of one of her prayers on the wall. Many of the graves and memorials have connections to the Austen family, such as those of their close friends the Digweed family who lived in the Steventon Manor House.

  One day in the late eighteenth century the young Jane Austen made her way to St Nicholas’s, to search out the parish register over which her father presided. At the front of the volume, which dated back to 1755 and was not filled until 1812, there were specimen entries to show clergymen how to complete marriage records. Jane Austen, whose name appears in the birth register for December 1775, filled out one of the forms. Already a fiction writer of sorts, she decided to get married – several times over. She picked up a pen and scribbled in names for the calling of the banns, the entry of the marriage itself and the witnessing:

  The Banns of Marriage between Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London and Jane Austen of Steventon.

  The Form of an Entry of a Marriage. Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool and Jane Austen of Steventon.

  The Marriage was witnessed between us. Jack Smith, Jane Smith, late Austen, in the presence of Jack Smith, Jane Smith.1

  Jane Austen’s facetious defacing of her father’s parish register suggests her easy relationship with him. The last entry is particularly amusing as the couple, Jack Smith and Jane Smith née Jane Austen, are witnesses to their own nuptials. One can only imagine how different the history of English fiction would have been if the young Jane Austen’s fleeting fantasy about love and marriage had been fulfilled.

  One certainty of a marriage would have been separation from her beloved sister. Jane was thought not to be as pretty as Cassandra, but she did not lack suitors. It would appear that she did not take the idea of marriage very seriously, but when Cassandra got engaged to Tom Fowle, Jane must have had some hesitation at the thought of being left alone with her parents. She loved them, but she adored Cassandra. The prospect of living without her was daunting. So perhaps it is not coincidental that Jane’s most active period of flirtation occurred in the years when Cassandra was engaged and waiting to be married. The oft-quoted remark from author and neighbour Mary Mitford that Jane was ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly’ relates to this sensitive time in her life, when she was forced to confront her own future.2

  At Christmas 1795, Jane began her own flirtations, most notably with a blond, handsome Irishman called Tom Lefroy. Her letters reveal that ‘other Admirers’ such as a wealthy Mr Heartley were also showing interest. And there was another ex-pupil of Steventon, John Warren: people thought that he was in love with Jane, though she refused to believe this. John Lyford, son of a local surgeon and male midwife, tried to dance with her but she managed to get away: ‘I was forced to fight hard.’ Charles Powlett, who according to Mrs Lefroy had deformed hands, tried to kiss her at a ball. He later became Chaplain to the Prince Regent. More alluringly, there was Edward Taylor, a year younger than her and whom she described as having ‘beautiful dark eyes’.3

  Her brief flirtation with Tom Lefroy has been well documented and, mistakenly, presented as the great love of her life, cruelly cut short by the machinations of Mrs Lefroy, Jane’s mentor and Tom’s aunt. Jane’s account of the affair is recorded in her letters to Cassandra, who was staying with her future in-laws in Berkshire. Her sister’s absence underlined the fact that she was in the market for a suitor.

  Jane’s tone is one of studied nonchalance, writing to tell her sister of her ‘profligate’ conduct at this very time. She had attended the Manydown Ball given by their friends the Bigg family. She refers to the fact that Cassandra has sent her a ‘scolding letter’ about her behaviour, but she playfully and provocatively expresses her indifference: ‘I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.’4

  She does however go on to reassure her sister that there is nothing serious in this romance: Tom Lefroy was due to leave the country. She enjoyed his attentions – in her own words he was ‘gentleman-like, good-looking, pleasant’ – and she was flattered that he was teased about his crush on her: ‘he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed to come to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs Lefroy a few days ago’.5 A man who ran away at her approach would never do for her, one suspects.

  Later she joked, ‘I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.’6 The white coat was a literary joke, a reference to Fielding’s roguish hero Tom Jones, who, famously, wore a white morning coat. It seems clear that this real-life Tom was as keen on Jane as his admired Tom Jones was on the lovely Sophia Western in Fielding’s novel. Jane clearly liked him well enough. They discussed novels, danced and flirted. Her friend John Warren, also a Steventon boy, drew a likeness of Tom Lefroy to give to her. She fell a little in love. But she was ripe to fall in love.

  Later in life Tom Lefroy, who became Chief Justice of Ireland, admitted that he had indeed been in love with the novelist Jane Austen, though it was a ‘boy’s love’.7 According to family tradition, Mrs Lefroy was furious with him for leading Jane on, and banned him from her rectory. Thus Mrs Lefroy has been seen as the obstacle separating the young lovers, a prototype Lady Russell in Persuasion, whose interference causes such misery. In fact, Mrs Lefroy acted honourably. She felt Tom had acted badly towards her protégée as Jane might have fallen in love with him and had her heart broken when he left the country.

  Tom was not in a financial position to offer marriage; as one of the Austen nieces later said firmly, ‘there was no engagement’.8 There were very strict though often tacit rules about courtship in the eighteenth century. Men who deliberately flirted with dowryless girls such as Jane Austen, with no intention of following through, could quickly find themselves very unpopular. Austen’s novels consistently address the complex rules of courtship conduct. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Bennet convinces herself that she has misread the signals with Mr Bingley: ‘It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.’ But Lizzy retorts, ‘And men take care that they should.’9

  But what did Jane really think? She told Cassandra, ‘I mean to confine myself to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don’t care sixpence.’ Then later she joked: ‘At length the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over – My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.’10 It seems clear from this comment that she was ambivalent about him, that his crush on her was stronger than her feelings for him and that she never took him entirely seriously but was flattered by his interest. The couple barely had time to get to know one another. The flowing tears as she writes, misread by some biographers as signs of Jane’s broken heart, are in reality little more than the author of the vellum notebooks projecting herself into the role of the heroine of a novel of sensibility.

  Nevertheless, she liked him and three years later she was keen to hear news of him: ‘I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.’11 Once again, George Austen comes across as a sensitive and thoughtful father, asking the question that he knew his daughter wanted to hear but was too proud to ask. Perhaps the fact that Tom lived in Ireland would have been enough to soften the blow to her pride. Going off to Shropshire was one thing, going to Ireland quite another; it would be the destiny of her Knight nieces, Louisa and Cassandra, to be forced to leave their beloved Kent for Ireland when they were married. Thankfully, Jane was spared such separation.

  She probably assumed that once Cassan
dra was married she would soon marry herself. But the death of Tom Fowle changed everything: it put an end not only to Cassy’s but also to Jane Austen’s matrimonial plans. In the years ahead Jane was to encounter several men who came close to proposing or indeed did propose marriage. Each time she shied away. There is strong evidence of an attachment between Jane and Edward Brook Bridges, brother of Elizabeth who married Edward Austen. She probably met him in 1794 when she first visited East Kent as the guest of her brother Edward. Two years later she opened a ball with Brook and he showed her great attention, playfully calling her ‘t’other Miss Austen’.12 Whenever they met he singled her out for attention: ‘it is impossible to do justice to the hospitality of his attentions towards me’, she told Cassy, ‘he made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account’.13 It seems that he proposed to Jane some time after he was ordained an Anglican priest, but was rejected. The proposal must have been before 1808 as she referred to his ‘unaltered manners’ to her when she saw him in June of that year.14 She made a more explicit reference to his proposal in October 1808 when she wrote this to Cassandra: ‘I wish you may be able to accept Lady Bridges’s invitation, tho’ I could not her son Edward’s.’15

  A year later when she discovered news of his engagement to someone else, she showed surprise but wished him well: ‘Your news of Edw: Bridges was quite news … I wish him happy with all my heart, and hope his choice may turn out according to his own expectations, and beyond those of his family.’16 His marriage was unhappy and Jane did not approve of his choice of wife: ‘she is a poor Honey – the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well – and who likes her spasms and nervousness and the consequence they give her, better than anything else’.17 Later she remarked of Edward: ‘Poor Wretch! He is quite the Dregs of the Family as to Luck.’18