by Paula Byrne
She took an interest, clearly, in the wives of her ex-beaux. Upon meeting the wife of Charles Powlett, who had tried to kiss her at the ball in 1796, she described her as being ‘everything that the Neighbour could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant’.19
One little-known romance, if Jane Austen’s aunt Leigh-Perrot is to be believed, was between Jane and Harry Digweed. The Digweeds were a very close family, and Steventon Manor, where they lived, adjoined the grounds of Steventon rectory. Jane referred to him as ‘my dear Harry’. Mrs LeighPerrot claimed that one of the reasons for the family’s move to Bath was to separate ‘Jane and a Digweed man’.20 Another of her supposed beaux was Charles Fowle, brother to Cassandra’s betrothed. When Jane found she couldn’t afford the stockings she wanted, he insisted on buying them for her, a rather intimate commission. Charles was more likely to have been a brother figure, another of the surrogate siblings that had boarded at the rectory, but whether or not he was one of her suitors, his behaviour shows how capable she was of inspiring affection in the men around her.
Another abortive romance was engineered by Mrs Lefroy in 1797. Perhaps distressed by her part in the Tom Lefroy debacle, she began matchmaking in earnest. She found Jane a man she clearly thought more suitable than her nephew and invited to Ashe parsonage a young man with good prospects, fellow of a Cambridge college, the Reverend Samuel Blackall. Mrs Lefroy had talked to him at length about her friend Jane, though Jane was surprised that Blackall was prepared to fall in love ‘knowing nothing of me’. After he had met Jane, he told Mrs Lefroy that he was interested in her as a suitable wife but had to wait some years before becoming financially secure. Jane wrote to Cassandra to relay the odd situation and her feelings towards him. She reported that Mrs Lefroy had shown her a letter which she had received from Blackall in which he had written, ‘I am very sorry to hear of Mrs Austen’s illness. It would give me particular pleasure to have an opportunity of improving my acquaintance with that family – with the hope of creating to myself a nearer interest. But at present I cannot indulge any expectation of it.’21
Jane might, reading between the lines, have suspected that Blackall was trying to placate Mrs Lefroy, who had pushed for the match. It is clear that Blackall had written previously to Mrs Lefroy to express his admiration for Jane, but was perhaps now pulling back. She went on to tell Cassandra:
This is rational enough; there is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before, and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceedingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner … our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me.22
The tone in this letter suggests that Austen was irked by the behaviour of her adored Mrs Lefroy, complaining that she ‘made no remarks on the letter, nor did she indeed say anything about him as relative to me. Perhaps she thinks she has said too much already.’ Jane Austen was not a woman to be pushed into marriage by anyone.
Nevertheless, she kept up an interest in Blackall and when he finally married she noted the fact to her brother Francis, who was clearly aware of the situation: ‘I wonder whether you happened to see Mr Blackall’s marriage in the papers last January. We did.’ She went on to say, ‘He was a piece of Perfection, noisy Perfection himself which I always recollect with regard.’ Regard, that is, not regret: after all, as she said in another letter, ‘pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked’.23 She also – as was her wont with ex-suitors – expressed a wish to know more about his wife, whose father had owned a plantation in Antigua: ‘I should very much like to know what sort of woman she is … I would wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn and rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn; – fond of cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, and a green window blind at night.’24
According to family tradition it was a ‘seaside romance’ that was the most important of Jane Austen’s romantic life. This occurred when she was living in Bath, and the family escaped the city in the summer. The various accounts of the romance are riven with discrepancies and inconsistencies. Some of them confuse the man with Samuel Blackall. The best account is from her niece Caroline, who relates that the family were holidaying in Devonshire when Jane Austen met and fell in love with a charming young man: ‘I never heard Aunt Cass. speak of anyone else with such admiration – she had no doubt that a mutual attachment was in progress between him and her sister. They parted – but he made it plain that he would seek them out again – and shortly afterwards he died!’25 Cousin Eliza wrote in 1801 that the Austens had just holidayed in Devonshire, so it was likely to have been on this visit.
One version of the story says that the mysterious gentleman was ‘a young clergyman visiting his brother, who was one of the doctors of the town’. He and Jane allegedly fell in love with each other, and when the Austens left the resort, probably Sidmouth, ‘he asked to be allowed to join them again further on in their tour, and the permission was given’. By this account, the family were encouraging a potential match. But instead of his arriving as expected, they received a letter announcing his death. In the more reliable version, the timescale is not quite so compressed: the mysterious gentleman asks where the family will be holidaying next year, perhaps implying that he will make a point of going there himself, but they hear of his death soon afterwards. All the accounts agree that he was someone special. Long after Jane’s death, Cassandra was telling family members that his ‘charm of person, mind and manners’ had made him ‘worthy to possess and likely to win her sister’s love’.26
Harris Bigg-Wither (His father, Lovelace Bigg, added the ‘Wither’ when he inherited property in 1789)
Just a year after the supposed seaside romance, Jane Austen came the closest to marriage she would ever come. She accepted a proposal from a family friend, only to rescind her acceptance the following morning. This was a most unlikely pairing, and it shows Jane Austen appearing to behave in a most uncharacteristic way. Was her disposition after all more highly strung and fragile than we would assume from the cool and ironic voice of the novels and the letters?
The story is told in the family record from the perspective of Mary Austen, brother James’s wife. She recorded the dates in her journal and then passed on the story in later years to her daughter Caroline. Jane and Cassandra had been staying with James and Mary back at the old family parsonage in Steventon late in the year of 1802. They took the opportunity to visit all their old friends, including Alethea and Catherine Bigg at Manydown Park, the lovely manor house where Jane had once danced and flirted with Tom Lefroy. The house, just two miles from Steventon, was set in fifteen hundred acres, and had a wing dating back to Tudor times, although the interior was beautifully modernized with an elegant staircase leading up to a spectacular first-floor drawing room.
Cassandra and Jane had intended to stay at Manydown for three weeks, but after only one week Mary Austen was surprised to see the arrival of the Biggs’ carriage containing the four young women in a state of distress. They parted in the hall with tears and affectionate farewells. Without a word of explanation to Mary, Jane and Cassandra requested that James should take them home straight away to Bath. Mary tried to discourage them, pleading his weekend rectorial duties, but Jane was not to be detained and insisted on their immediate removal.
Eventually Mary and James were given an explanation. They were told that Catherine and Alethea’s brother Harris had proposed to Jane and she had accepted him. However, on the following morning she had changed her mind and withdrawn her consent. According to Caroline, who had discussed the episode with her mother, Harris was ‘very plain in person – awkward, and even uncouth in manner’. To judge from a surviving portrait sketch, though, his appearance was not so very unpresentable. He was tall, just down from Worcester College, Oxford, and six years younger than Jane, who was a couple of weeks short of her twenty-seventh birthday, an age at which prospects of a
ny decent marriage would rapidly start receding. He did have a speech impediment, but he was kind, sensible and respectable. And, of course, he stood to inherit a considerable fortune. His elder brother had died as a teenager, so he stood to inherit Manydown. As Caroline reported, ‘a great many would have taken him without love’.27
Why did she initially accept him? One explanation is that she was at a vulnerable moment, unhappy to be living in Bath, longing for a return to the locality of her childhood, and possibly recovering from news of the death of her seaside lover. The seeming evidence of a lost letter suggests that she herself described her decision as ‘a momentary fit of self-delusion’.28 Caroline believed that her aunt’s acceptance was based on the advantages of the match and her long friendship with the family, but that on overnight reflection she thought that it would prove a miserable marriage: ‘the place and the fortune which would certainly be his, could not alter the man’. In Caroline’s interpretation of events, it was the ‘worldly advantages’ that momentarily appealed: ‘My Aunts had very small fortunes and on their Father’s death they and their Mother would be, they were aware, but poorly off – I believe most women so circumstanced would have taken Mr. W. and trusted to love after marriage.’29
But Jane Austen was not ‘most young women’. She simply wasn’t in love with Harris and – whether as an agony aunt or a novelist – she was never someone to advise matrimony for financial gain without love, whatever the temptations of security and status. When advising her niece Fanny on marriage she counselled that ‘Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection’ and that ‘nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love’.30
We can only assume that during the long night when she changed her mind she took her own advice. She knew she was not in love with this man, whom she always thought of as her friend’s little brother. He was not very clever: he failed to complete his studies at Worcester College. And he had health problems – a couple of years before, Austen had written in passing, ‘Harris seems still in a poor way, from his bad habit of body; his hand bled again a little the other day, and Dr Littlehales has been with him lately.’31 The year before that, she reported that he had been seized one morning at Winchester with ‘a return of his former alarming complaint’; he recovered quickly from the ‘attack’, but ‘in such a disorder his danger, I suppose, must always be great’.32 This all sounds alarmingly reminiscent of the seizures of poor little George Austen. The prospect of a marriage that lacked scintillating conversation and that might descend into mere care for an invalid was not, on reflection, so very inviting after all. Having impulsively agreed, Jane Austen had the courage to come down in the morning and make a graceful withdrawal of her acceptance.
For Bigg-Wither, the consequence was more a degree of humiliation than a broken heart. He was only just twenty-one and he duly married less than two years later. He found a well-to-do girl from the Isle of Wight who bore him ten children before he died of apoplexy aged just over fifty.
Her decision to reject Harris greatly upset her sister-in-law Mary, who thought it was a good match for Jane. The telling detail in the story is not Harris’s distress but that of the two pairs of sisters, crying in the hall. Jane and Cassandra were greatly attached to the Bigg sisters, and she must have felt that she had let them down. We can only imagine the scenes of jubilation when Jane accepted the proposal that night of 2 December only to have to face Harris, Catherine and Alethea in the morning with her retraction. It is to the credit of one and all that the family remained friends.
Other interested suitors were to be treated as little more than a joke. There was Mr Papillon, rector of Chawton (‘I will marry Mr Papillon, whatever may be his reluctance or my own’), Henry’s lawyer friend William Seymour who (Mr Elton-like) ‘almost’ proposed to her on a long coach ride, and the Prince Regent’s librarian Stanier Clarke who was smitten by her. When she was at Stoneleigh in 1806, she was greatly admired by a Member of Parliament from Wigan, a distant relation of the Leigh family, but she gave him little encouragement. As one modern Janeite blogger has written, ‘is there no end to the list of men who fancied Jane Austen’?33
There is something admirable about her decision to reject Harris BiggWither. If her niece was correct in saying that she was tempted by his wealth, before coming to her senses, it is easy to see why, as a dowryless woman, she had her moment of madness. In Pride and Prejudice, she invites us to consider the ethics of marrying a repulsive man for security. Plain but clever Charlotte Lucas marries Mr Collins, one of Jane Austen’s most sexually repellent characters, for social and economic reasons. Charlotte views marriage as a job: ‘Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.’34
Though Charlotte is presented sympathetically – marriage is a contract and each side knows what they’re getting from the transaction – Lizzy Bennet ultimately rejects Charlotte’s mercenary motives for marrying a man she does not and cannot love. Mary Wollstonecraft famously described marriage ‘for support’ as tantamount to ‘legal prostitution’.35 The sub-text to Lizzy’s rejection of Mr Collins’s proposal is her sexual antipathy towards him. Perhaps her creator was also repelled by the thought of having sex with the oafish, awkward, stammering Harris.
This brings us to sex and childbirth. No one knows what went through Jane Austen’s mind in the long night when she thought about what the reality of marriage to Harris would mean, and then changed her mind, but she must have weighed up the costs and going to bed with him would surely have been one of them.
Jane Austen was certainly not prudish about sex. Illicit sex, either in adultery or sex before marriage, is explored in several of the novels. Poor Eliza Williams in Sense and Sensibility is seduced and left pregnant by the cad Willoughby: that he comes close to harming Marianne in the same way is made clear. Maria Bertram cuckolds her husband with the rake Henry Crawford. Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon plans to rape Clara Brereton in the manner of Richardson’s Lovelace.
But she does not only present us with women as victims of predatory men. Jane Austen also wrote about woman’s sexual pleasure. In the character of Lydia Bennet she presents us with a lusty teenage girl who enjoys sex before marriage with Wickham with very little concern for the consequences. They live together in lodgings in London. When Lizzy tells Darcy that Lydia is ‘lost for ever’, she is making it clear that he will never marry her: ‘She has no money, no connections, nothing that can tempt him to …’36 Lydia’s ‘infamy’ (a strong word for Jane Austen) is emphasized, and Wickham’s ‘violation of decency, honour and interest’. The long discussion between Elizabeth and Mrs Gardiner about Lydia’s sexual transgression is remarkably open: ‘But can you think that Lydia is so lost to everything but love of him, as to consent to live with him on any other terms than marriage?’ asks Mrs Gardiner. Elizabeth, fully aware of her sister’s ‘animal spirits’, knows that she is very capable of living in sin with him. She has not been seduced or forced by Wickham. She enters into her relationship with her eyes wide open. Lydia herself is indifferent to her disgrace: ‘she would not hear of leaving Wickham. She was sure they should be married some time or the other, and it did not much signify when.’37
In Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram’s adultery with Henry Crawford is foreshadowed in a scene at Sotherton where she leaves behind her betrothed, Mr Rushworth, to climb around an iron gate with Henry Crawford to enter the wilderness beyond. Fanny Price urges her cousin to consider her actions: ‘You will hurt yourself, Miss Bertram … you will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes – you will tear your gown – you will be in danger of slipping into the ha-ha.’38
The image of the torn dress as a symbol of sexual disgrace is also used in Pride and Prejudice. Lydia sends a request to her maid that she should ‘mend a great slit in my
worked muslin gown’.39 We do not have to be Freudians to recognize a shocking image of her sexual transgression. Lydia’s ‘slit’ can’t be mended, except by a forced marriage, which is exactly what happens, though no one is fooled by the ‘patched-up business’.40 Jane Austen allows Lydia to be free from repentance or shame. Indeed, the moral torchlight is shone upon the odious Mr Collins when he tells Mr Bennet to ‘throw off your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her to repay the fruits of her own heinous offence’.41 Lydia is fortunate not to share the fate of Eliza Williams in Sense and Sensibility, who is abandoned by Willoughby when she falls pregnant with his child.
Sex leads to pregnancy and in Georgian England that often led to death. Jane Austen seems to have had a phobia of childbirth, which is hardly surprising given the number of women she knew who died in childbed, including two of her sisters-in-law. There are many glimpses in her letters of her fears and anxieties around what she called ‘the business of mothering’. In the same letter in which she wrote about her suitors Tom Lefroy and Samuel Blackall her thoughts turned to her sister-in-law Mary Austen, who was shortly expecting to give birth, ‘she was glad to get rid of her child, of whom she is heartily tired’. Jane noted that ‘Mrs Coulthard and Anne, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed. We have not regaled Mary with this news.’ She added drily but revealingly, ‘Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself.’42