The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  One winter’s day in 1804 Anne Lefroy set off on horseback with a servant to do some shopping. Meeting James Austen in the village, she remarked on the stupidity and laziness of her horse. It bolted on the way home and the Lefroy servant couldn’t catch it. In trying to get off, Anne fell and hit her head on the road. She died twelve hours later. She was only fifty-five. It was 16 December, Jane Austen’s twenty-ninth birthday. Anne Lefroy was deeply mourned in the neighbourhood and by all who knew her. According to an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘It would be almost impossible to find an individual, in a private station, whose death will be more generally and deeply felt … In intellect, in heart, in temper, in manners, in strict and elevated principles, in pure and untainted conduct, she has left no second behind her.’14

  A poem by Jane Austen reveals the depth of her devotion. Here Anne is described as ‘the best of women’:

  Angelic woman! past my power to praise

  In language meet thy talents, temper, and mind,

  Thy solid worth, thy captivating grace,

  Thou friend and ornament of human kind.15

  This is the orthodox poetic language of the age, but no less sincere for that. There is a clear impression of Mrs Lefroy’s good sense, her creativity, her sweetness of manner and evenness of temper, her beauty and her Christian spirit, her ‘grace of tongue’ which meant that she ‘never misapplied’ language – praise indeed from the young author.

  Jane Austen never got over the shock of Anne’s sudden demise. Every birthday brought her pain because it was a reminder of the day she had lost her ‘Beloved Friend’:

  The day returns again, my natal day;

  What mix’d emotions in my mind arise!

  Beloved Friend; four years have passed away

  Since thou wert snatched for ever from our eyes.16

  There is something especially poignant in Jane Austen’s acknowledgement that it was Mrs Lefroy’s interest in her as a young girl that initiated the love they felt for each other: ‘Her partial favour from my earliest years/Consummates all.’ She had lost a friend who was almost a second mother, a mentor who had nurtured both her talent and her character in her formative years.

  A second, even worse blow fell just a few weeks later. Mrs Austen had always been the one in poor health, but then the Reverend George Austen began suffering from a persistent feverish complaint. He was taken ill one Saturday morning early in 1805. He seemed to be a little better by the evening, and the next day he got up and walked around the house.

  But his ‘fever’ got worse towards the end of the day, and he died the following morning. Jane cut off a lock of her beloved father’s hair and kept it in a wrap of paper. The loss was especially painful because it came so soon after Mrs Lefroy’s fatal accident. This was the darkest period of Jane Austen’s life.

  The funeral took place in St Swithin’s, the parish church of genteel Bath, the following Saturday. George Austen was buried in the crypt and a simple ledger stone was carved for his grave: ‘Under this stone rests the remains of the Revd. GEORGE AUSTEN Rector of Steventon and Deane in Hampshire who departed this life the 21st January 1805 Aged 73 years’. James and Henry were in attendance, but the naval brothers were not able to make it (widows and daughters did not usually attend funerals).

  Jane Austen wrote to her brother Frank on the day of their father’s death, comforting herself with the thought that it was not a prolonged illness and that ‘his worth and constant preparation for another World’ must have assured his salvation.17 He had done his duty, as the ledger stone said, as a rector; he would now be rewarded in heaven. His daughter wrote again the following day: ‘We have lost an Excellent Father … To have seen him languishing long, struggling for Hours, would have been dreadful! – and thank God! we were all spared from it. Except the restlessness and confusion of high Fever, he did not suffer.’ ‘His tenderness as a Father’, she added, ‘who can do justice to?’18 A week later she sent Frank some small tokens of remembrance: a miniature compass and sundial in a black shagreen case, together with a pair of scissors.

  Jane Austen’s own religious faith saw her through this worst of times, as it did through all her life. The following words are not in the voice that we are familiar with from the novels, but they were written in Jane Austen’s hand: ‘Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of temper and evil habit which we have indulged in to the discomfort of our fellow creatures and the danger of our own souls.’ And again,

  Heartily do we pray for the safety of all that travel by Land or by Sea, for the comfort and protection of the Orphan and Widow and that thy pity may be shewn upon all Captives and Prisoners. Above all other blessings Oh! God, for ourselves, and our fellow-creatures, we implore Thee to quicken our sense of thy Mercy in the redemption of the World, of the Value of that Holy Religion in which we have been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect, throw away the salvation thou has given us, nor be Christians only in name.

  Jane Austen’s beloved father

  Cassandra Austen, at her death in 1845, left her niece, Cassandra Esten (‘Cassy’) Austen, the eldest daughter of their brother Charles, two sheets of paper containing the prayers from which these quotations are taken.19 The inscription ‘Prayers Composed by my ever dear Sister Jane’ appears on the outside of the folded sheets.

  These prayers were probably written for the purpose of family devotion. It does seem likely that the Austen family observed evening prayers at home. A letter written to Cassandra on a Sunday night in 1808 refers to evening devotions (which would include prayers): ‘In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home.’20 In Mansfield Park Fanny Price says of morning and evening prayers at Sotherton, ‘A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer, is fine.’21

  Jane Austen was a devout Christian. Her surviving letters barely touch on her faith precisely because it was deeply personal and not to be treated lightly or with frivolity. To Cassandra she did not need to write about the faith that they shared. Among those few letters to others that do survive, several, notably those written following a death, and above all the two to Frank in the immediate aftermath of her father’s parting, are testimony to her profound and sincere faith.

  Her faith is also apparent from her admiration for a painting that she saw when she was in London in 1814 correcting proofs and changing her publisher. She went to an art exhibition in Pall Mall and was especially impressed by Benjamin West’s vast canvas Christ Rejected, as she reported to Martha Lloyd:

  I have seen West’s famous Painting, and prefer it to anything of the kind I ever saw before. I do not know that it is reckoned superior to his ‘Healing in the Temple’, but it has gratified me much more, and indeed is the first representation of our Saviour which ever at all contented me. ‘His Rejection by the Elders’, is the subject. – I want to have You and Cassandra see it.22

  Her words ‘our Saviour’ are particularly striking.

  With her enlightened upbringing and knowledge of human nature, she was never shocked by adultery, yet when she read in the local newspaper that a married neighbour, Mrs Powlett, had eloped, she was saddened and surprised – not by the adultery but more because the previous Sunday Mrs Powlett had ‘staid the Sacrament’ (stayed behind after Morning Prayer in order to receive Holy Communion) at church alongside Jane and Cassandra.23

  Henry Austen described his sister as ‘thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature’. It must be remembered that by the time he wrote this he was a clergyman with Evangelical leanings and a very enthusiastic one at that. Certainly the comments in Jane Austen’s letters would suggest that she was quite capable of giving offence to people. Henry was right to emphasize her deep and sincere faith, but it was of great importance to her that it remained private and sacred, not to be openly discussed.

  Henry attested that her opinions ‘accorded strictly
with those of our Established Church’.24 By this he meant the conservative Anglican Church. She was the daughter of a High Church Tory rector at a time when there was a great deal of laxity in the Church. Many clergymen were pluralists, which meant that they held several livings at the same time – her father was rector of both Steventon and Deane. As a child she showed a deliberately provocative, if playful, fondness for Roman Catholicism. Writing about King James I she wrote, ‘As I am myself partial to the roman catholic religion, it is with infinite regret that I am obliged to blame the Behaviour of any Member of it … in this reign the roman Catholics of England did not behave like Gentlemen to the protestants.’25 But of course the real allegiance she is showing here is not to the Church of Rome but to the Stuart line.

  During her lifetime, the Evangelical movement burgeoned, sweeping some of her own family into its wake, much to her dismay. Evangelicals had no time for ritual and placed emphasis on the individual, the sinner, who repents, is saved and ‘converted’ by the Holy Spirit. Biblical authority was paramount, as well as the need for actively sharing the Gospel and expressing one’s faith. They viewed the Holy Spirit as above ‘reason’, decrying the ‘deist’ theologians of the eighteenth century, intellectual descendants of John Locke, for ‘the fashion in introducing a pompous display of reasoning into religion’.26 As a woman whose faith was so personal and quiet, Jane Austen found the zeal of the Evangelicals repugnant. It was their overbearing ‘enthusiasm’ that she found especially unseemly.

  Her own cousin Edward Cooper, of whom she was once fond, became a fervent Evangelical. ‘We do not much like Mr. Cooper’s new Sermons,’ she wrote late in her life, ‘they are fuller of Regeneration and Conversion than ever – with the addition of his zeal in the cause of the Bible Society.’27 (The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 by the Evangelicals, distributed free copies of the Bible to the poor and the heathen.) Jane Austen had been reading cousin Cooper’s latest book, Two Sermons Preached in the Old and the New Churches at Wolverhampton, preparatory to the Establishment of a Bible-Institution, published in 1816. The ‘zeal’ to which she refers is apparent throughout: ‘Bear in mind that it is not enough to live under the light, you must also walk in the light. It is not enough that the light is around you, it must be also in you.’28

  She was also familiar with Cooper’s most popular work, his Sermons of 1809, which went into many editions. Here he writes of the sinner, the promise of the Gospel, the Holy Spirit and the need for Conversion. She was keen to hear Cassandra’s view of this drearily written tirade, adding that Edward’s son had also become a ‘Pompous Sermon-writer’.29 She could not abide Cooper’s zeal, his pomposity, his lack of humour and his childlike belief that some were saved and others not. Following the death of her sister-in-law Elizabeth Knight, she hoped that Edward would not send one of his letters of ‘cruel comfort’ (that is to say a sermon on the world as a vale of tears and the delights of the afterlife).30

  One particularly influential group of Evangelicals, based in south London, were known as the ‘Clapham sect’ or ‘The Saints’. As committed to social reform as they were to the Gospel, they included figures such as the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, the theologian and preacher Thomas Gisborne and the schoolmistress, philanthropist and bestselling novelist Hannah More. All of them were friends of Jane Austen’s Evangelical cousin Edward Cooper. She was determined to dislike them. When Cassandra recommended More’s ‘sermon novel’ Coelebs in Search of a Wife in 1809, she made her feelings quite clear: ‘You have by no means raised my curiosity after Caleb; – My disinclination for it before was affected, but now it is real; I do not like the Evangelicals. Of course I shall be delighted when I read it, like other people, but till I do, I dislike it.’31 She refused to call the novel by its ridiculous name Coelebs – Cassandra thought that Jane had referred to it as ‘Caleb’ because she had misread her handwriting, but Jane replied that ‘Caleb’ had an ‘honest, unpretending sound’ whereas Coelebs was ‘pedantry and affectation’.32

  Nevertheless, when advising her niece Fanny on courtship matters in 1814 – Fanny was worried that her suitor might be attracted to Evangelicalism – she jumped to their defence: ‘I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason and Feeling, must be happiest and safest.’

  But this remark must be seen in context. It comes from the extraordinarily beautiful and complex letter of courtship advice discussed earlier, in which Austen begins by trying to show Fanny that she can’t be in love with the man in question, but then the more she writes the warmer her feelings become towards him. It is a letter that, like a great work of art, considers not just ‘one side of the question’ but both; a letter that reveals Austen’s suppleness of thought and openness of opinion – ‘I am feeling differently every moment, and shall not be able to suggest a single thing that can assist your Mind. – I could lament in one sentence and laugh in the next, but as to Opinion or Counsel I am sure none will [be] extracted worth having from this Letter.’33 This is a superb reminder that we should be very hesitant about ‘extracting’ Jane Austen’s ‘Opinion or Counsel’ – about Evangelical faith or anything else – from her novels and letters. It was precisely the imposition of ‘Opinion or Counsel’ on the reader that she disliked about the didacticism of writers such as More and Gisborne (she may have softened in her prejudice against Gisborne because on reading him she discovered that he was slightly less rigid and opinionated than she had imagined he would be from his titles and reputation). For Jane Austen, it was not the business of writers to tell people what to do. It was their business to track the endlessly fascinating process of how human beings find themselves ‘feeling differently every moment’.

  What she is also saying to Fanny is that one should not generalize about classes of people. Not all Evangelicals are the same. If someone comes to an Evangelical position from both ‘Reason and Feeling’ (both sense and sensibility), all well and good. Especially good, she no doubt thought, if that faith led to good works among the poor and support for the abolition of the slave trade. Fanny’s response to her aunt’s letter is lost, but she obviously took it seriously because Austen wrote back to say ‘I cannot suppose we differ in our ideas of the Christian Religion. You have given an excellent description of it. We only affix a different meaning to the Word Evangelical.’34

  Fanny Knight, to whom Austen wrote about her ‘ideas of the Christian Religion’

  If Austen was such a devoted Christian, how was that reflected in her novels? In one of the first extended accounts of her literary career, Richard Whately, later Archbishop of Dublin, writing in the Quarterly Review in 1821, perceived that while she was a Christian writer, she was not, like her contemporaries Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More, morally didactic. She did not write ‘dramatic sermons’ rather than novels. Her primary aim was to please, so she did not allow her morality and religion to obtrude:

  Miss Austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion not being at all obtrusive … The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon. The moral lessons … spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced upon the reader.35

  Whately’s review would no doubt have pleased her. Moral didacticism she abhorred. Her dislike for Hannah More, whose books really were dramatized sermons, was evident. Her joke about inserting one or two of her brother Henry’s sermons in a novel, to be discussed in a later chapter, shows that a sermonizer was not the sort of novelist she wanted to be. She was a quintessential Anglican: spiritually sincere but undemonstrative, with a quiet religion characterized, in Whately’s fine phrase, by ‘practical utility’. And it is the practical utility of Christianity that interests her in the novels.

  Importantly, not one of the clergymen
in her novels shows any affinity with the Evangelical movement. In her unfinished novel The Watsons, Mr Howard is praised for speaking his sermon, ‘without any Theatrical grimace or violence’. He preaches ‘with great propriety and in a very impressive manner … much better calculated to inspire Devotion’.36 Measured and reasoned discourse is what she approves of – not the fire and brimstone of the histrionic Evangelicals. Had The Watsons been finished, this worthy clergyman would have married the heroine.

  But her fictional clergymen are by no means all paragons of virtue. Henry Tilney is a charming picture of a young clergyman who still loves secular pleasures such as dancing, reading novels and theatre-visits – all pursuits frowned upon by ‘The Saints’. Austen had observed enough clergymen in her lifetime to know that many of them were far from being saintly. Dr Grant in Mansfield Park is a glutton and Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice a toady. Mr Elton in Emma is odious. In the ‘Opinions of Emma’ that she gathered from family and friends, she noted down the views of a Mrs Wroughton: ‘Thought the Authoress wrong, in such times as these, to draw such Clergymen as Mr Collins and Mr Elton’.37

  Her knowledge of the clergy was precise. Her father was a clergyman, and two of her brothers became clergymen. The heroes of Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, Edward Ferrars, Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, are clergymen. When she tells us that Edward Ferrars has reached the age of twenty-four, she expects her readers to know that this is highly significant. Under the Clergy Ordination Act of 1804, a man had to be twenty-four before he could be ordained to the Anglican priesthood or hold a living in the Church of England. Now that he is twenty-four Edward is able to take the incumbency of Delaford. It is a small but important point.