The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  Many moments of emotional intensity in the novels are mediated through the witnessing presence of small children. In Emma, when Mr Knightley’s emotional distress overwhelms him at Brunswick Square, one of his brother’s children observes that ‘Uncle seems always tired now.’35

  Two especially memorable scenes centre upon small children. Few can forget the emotional impact of the moment in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth silently removes the troublesome toddler from Anne’s back. In a scene of excruciating comic embarrassment and high emotion, he enters Uppercross Cottage to find not the Miss Musgroves whom he expects, but Anne, alone except for little Charles Musgrove resting on a sofa nursing a broken collar-bone. She is unable to leave the room because the little boy requires her help, and she kneels to assist him. Wentworth is embarrassed and silent until he gathers his thoughts to enquire coldly after the little boy’s health. The high discomfort is compounded when Charles Hayter enters, displeased to see Wentworth. He takes up his newspaper in silence. The door opens again and a stout two-year-old boy enters:

  There being nothing to eat, he could only have some play; and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him – ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

  ‘Walter,’ said she, ‘get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you’ … In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his sturdy little hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.36

  The emotion between the former lovers is beautifully depicted. Anne is unable to speak her thanks, but her internal ‘disordered feelings’ are rendered by Austen’s innovative device of free indirect speech (third-person narrative that is written as if from within the mind of a character): ‘His kindness in stepping forward to her relief – the manner – the silence in which it had passed – the little particulars of the circumstance – with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks … produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from.’37

  To the reader, of course, other things are at play: Charles Hayter’s barely concealed jealousy of Wentworth, Anne’s intense but silent emotion, Wentworth’s icy formality towards her as he hides his pain and anger about the past. The point is that Wentworth doesn’t realize that he still loves Anne: he tries to punish her with his indifference and coldness but he is betrayed by his actions.38 Her guilt and sorrow are suggested in her bowing head and kneeling posture, his ‘angry pride’ in refusing her thanks. These details and the child’s ‘sturdy hands’, determined not to be shaken off, all show great delicacy of touch in this powerfully rendered and exceptionally tender scene.

  Perhaps the most vividly drawn child in Jane Austen’s novels is the charming and true-to-life Charles Blake in the fragment The Watsons. The ten-year-old boy is drawn in great detail at a ball where he is waiting to dance the first two dances with Miss Osborne: ‘Oh yes, we have been engaged this week … and we are to dance down every couple.’ But Miss Osborne casually breaks her engagement to Charles and the child’s humiliation is acutely drawn:

  He stood the picture of disappointment, with crimson’d cheeks, quivering lips, and eyes bent on the floor. His mother, stifling her own mortification, tried to soothe his with the prospect of Miss Osborne’s second promise; – but tho’ he contrived to utter with an effort of Boyish Bravery ‘Oh! I do not mind it’ – it was very evident by the unceasing agitation of his features that he minded it as much as ever.39

  As with the scene in Persuasion, the child’s action is a turning point in the novel. The boy is trying not to cry. A child trying not to cry is always more moving than a child who is crying. The heroine Emma Watson comes to his rescue, an action that brings her to the notice of the wealthy family who have hitherto ignored her:

  Emma did not think, or reflect; – she felt and acted –. ‘I shall be very happy to dance with you Sir, if you like it’, said she, holding out her hand with most unaffected good humour. – The Boy in one moment restored to all his first delight – looked joyfully at his Mother and stepping forwards with an honest and simple Thank you Maam was instantly ready to attend to his new acquaintance.40

  Charles invites Emma to Osborne Castle: ‘there is a monstrous curious stuff’d Fox there, and a Badger – anybody would think they were alive. It is a pity you should not see them.’41 This is a wonderful example of the way children believe that their own passions must be of interest to any rightthinking adult.

  Jane Austen gets children right because the children in her life and in the life of the novels are realistic portraits, pleasant and unpleasant. They can be brats like Anna Maria Middleton in Sense and Sensibility (surely the best depiction of a vile spoilt child in all of the novels), or as adorable as Charles Blake or Henry and John Knightley, who sit and count raindrops until there are too many to count. This lovely detail is based on a real-life observation. Following their mother’s death in childbed, Lizzy and Marianne Knight were sent away to boarding school in Essex. Their journey was undertaken in wet weather and Jane advised them to ‘amuse themselves with watching the raindrops down the Windows’.42

  She knew perfectly well that, as with adults, some children were nice and some were not. So with Anna Lefroy’s girls: ‘Jemima has a very irritable bad Temper (her Mother says so) – and Julia a very sweet one, always pleased and happy.’43 Jane Austen lived in the age of Rousseau and Wordsworth, when writers were more fascinated by children than ever before. She was no Romantic – Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Sanditon all cast an ironic eye on the excesses of Romantic feeling – but she shared with the Romantics a belief that the inner child never really leaves us. When she was ill from the slow painful disease from which she never recovered, she wrote, ‘tell [William] I often play at Nines and think of him’.44 On her deathbed she played cards and wrote comic verses.

  16

  The Laptop

  It is a wooden box that can be placed on a table. Or on a writer’s lap. It can be used as a book rest. It opens to reveal a sloped leather-inlaid writing surface and storage space for inkpot and writing implements. There is a long drawer for paper. It is surprisingly small, about the size of a portable typewriter. Small, light and easily transportable, it can go anywhere. It has a lock and key, so its contents are private, rather like a diary. Like any portable device, it can be easily misplaced or even stolen.

  This particular writing box or ‘slope’ was bought at Ring Brothers, a shopping emporium in Basingstoke. The Reverend George Austen recorded the purchase in his pocket book: ‘A Small Mahogany Writing desk with 1 Long Drawer and Glass Ink Stand Compleat. 12 s[hillings]. December 5, 1794’.1 Given the timing, it is probable that it was intended as a present for his daughter Jane’s nineteenth birthday.

  The descendants of Jane Austen’s eldest brother James, the Austen-Leigh family, were in possession of this box until the end of the twentieth century. Joan Austen-Leigh kept it safe in an old suitcase in a closet in her home in Canada. In 1999, she and her eldest daughter travelled to London and donated it to the British Library, where it is now exhibited to the public along with various other literary treasures.2

  Throughout Jane Austen’s lifetime writing boxes were to be found on military expeditions and on travels in pursuit of pleasure or knowledge, as well as in libraries and drawing rooms. Great literature was created on them. At the same time, dispatches, contracts, letters and postcards were written on their simple but practical sloping surfaces. The writing box allowed for the swift transaction of both busine
ss and personal activity in an age when communication was vastly speeded up by huge improvements in the postal system. In a time of global voyaging and emergent empire, letters were of immense importance. Pages and pages penned on Jane Austen’s writing box found their way to her naval brothers as they served their country in the East Indies and the West, in the Mediterranean and off the African coast.

  Writing boxes such as Jane Austen’s were highly desirable items, a form of state-of-the-art equipment in a world where the improvement of roads and carriages meant that people were travelling more than ever before. A piece of kit that holds precious and private information, that can be locked away safely and that can be taken along with you on your travels: this is the Georgian forerunner of the laptop computer. The device was actually sometimes known as a ‘lap-desk’. Unlike the full-size writing desk or for that matter the little round drawing-room table at which we usually imagine Jane Austen sitting with her quill, this was a personal and not a household possession. It was the place to keep your most intimate correspondence. Or the manuscript of your latest novel.

  The nineteenth-birthday present was highly significant to Jane Austen. It was a symbol of her father’s faith in her and his encouragement of her writing. More than this, as a particularly well-travelled young woman, who often spent time away from home, it allowed her to carry on with her scribbling wherever she happened to be.

  It wasn’t long before she nearly lost it. At the end of October 1798 Jane and her parents had left Godmersham, where they had been on an extended visit to Edward and his family.

  Edward’s carriage had taken them as far as Sittingbourne. From there they travelled in a post-chaise. Jane joked that ‘we had a famous pair of horses, which took us to Rochester in an hour and a quarter; the postboy seemed determined to show my mother that Kentish drivers were not always tedious’.3 Their stopping post was an inn at Dartford, the Bull and George, where they took rooms for the night. Jane’s mother was not a good traveller and took some bitters to calm her nerves – bitters were used for stomach complaints and helped with insomnia. Jane noted, grimly, that her mother’s stomach complaints included excessive diarrhoea, ‘that particular kind of evacuation which has generally preceded her Illnesses’.4 She and her father, meanwhile, had a dinner of beefsteak and boiled fowl, though, to her disappointment, there was no oyster sauce.

  She administered laudanum to her mother while her father sat by the fire reading a Gothic thriller called The Midnight Bell and she wrote to Cassandra about a near-miss when her portable desk, along with her dressing box, had accidentally been taken to a chaise that was just packing off as they came in. It was ‘driven away towards Gravesend in their way to the West Indies’.5 To her great relief, someone gave chase and her boxes were safely returned. She made a joke of the incident, but it had shaken her up. In the box was seven pounds (‘all my worldly wealth’) and a deputation for a friend, Harry Digweed, giving him permission to shoot game on Steventon land, and signed by Edward Austen. We shall never know what other precious items might have been inadvertently shipped to the West Indies.

  The late 1790s were crucial years for both Austen’s travels and her writings. The laptop desk was her constant companion. According to a memorandum of Cassandra’s, ‘First Impressions’ (the lost original version of Pride and Prejudice) was begun in October 1796 and finished in August 1797. In 1797 she was also transforming ‘Elinor and Marianne’ into Sense and Sensibility. And Northanger Abbey, or ‘Susan’ as it was then called, was written between 1798 and 1799.

  She now learnt how to write on the hoof – and this explains why once at Chawton (with relative peace) she was able to write fluently despite the disturbances of family and visitors. At Godmersham, she remarked that ‘In this House there is a constant succession of small events, somebody is always going or coming.’6 She was expected to join in expeditions about the countryside, which interfered with her time for writing.

  The fact that Jane Austen had many distractions from her work does not, however, mean that, as is sometimes said, she ‘fell silent’ or endured a ‘barren period’ between leaving for Bath in 1801 and settling down at Chawton in 1809.7 Admittedly it wasn’t as fertile a time as the two periods of intense creativity at Steventon in the 1790s and Chawton between 1809 and her death, but it was hardly a decade of literary inactivity. She spent the first decade of the nineteenth century polishing, revising and making fair copies of manuscripts for publication. In addition, it was a time when two further novels were developed, though aborted.

  In the autumn of 1797, the completed manuscript of ‘First Impressions’ was sent to Thomas Cadell, perhaps the leading literary publishing house in London. The Cadell list included an array of impressive titles from the poetry of Robert Burns to Dr Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. More to the point from Jane Austen’s point of view, Thomas Cadell the younger, who had taken over the business following his father’s retirement in 1793, had shown a strong interest in fiction. Following a rival’s huge success with Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, he had snapped up her next title, The Italian. And he was the co-publisher of Fanny Burney’s Camilla. Austen could not have been in better company. George Austen sent the manuscript on his daughter’s behalf. It was rejected by return of post.

  Jane Austen was not deterred. She got on with her revision of ‘Elinor and Marianne’, and she started her new work, ‘Susan’. It was a parody of the Gothic novel, that genre to which the younger Cadell had committed himself. Perhaps some part of her was having a dig at Cadell: if he was willing to pay the large sum of £800 (£75,000 or more than $100,000 in modern terms) for the successor to The Mysteries of Udolpho but then to reject her own book without even reading it, she would show him just how foolish a genre the Gothic was. Just over a year later, she would take ‘First Impressions’ with her in the writing box on her first trip to Bath. Presumably, she was intending to do some further work on it, in the hope of finding an alternative publisher.

  By 1803, halfway through her period of residence in Bath, ‘Susan’ – embellished with many details of life in the fashionable spa – was ready for publication. Henry Austen’s business associate Mr Seymour sold the manuscript on Jane’s behalf to a London publishing house called Crosby and Co. of Stationer’s Court, for £10, with a stipulation for early publication. How delighted she must have been to have the ten pounds in her pocket book. For the first time, she had made some money from her writing.

  Crosby, who had a long list of historical and Gothic novels on his roster, liked to advertise forthcoming publications in his annual review Flowers of Literature. Within a short time of his receiving Austen’s manuscript from Seymour, he duly announced that among the ‘NEW and USEFUL BOOKS; Published by B. Crosby and Co. Stationers’ Court, London’, the following were ‘In the Press’: ‘15. SUSAN; a Novel, in 2 vols. 16. DICTIONARY OF CELEBRATED WOMEN. By Miss Beetham, in one volume.’8 The dictionary of female historical celebrities by Matilda Betham, a friend of Coleridge and Charles Lamb, was duly published the following year, but ‘Susan’ never appeared. The story in the Austen family was that as a publisher of ‘Gothic Romances’ Crosby got cold feet about being associated with a satire on the kind of books that filled his list.

  The William Seymour who made the sale to Crosby was a lawyer and bachelor friend of Henry Austen. He lived in Cavendish Square. Jane Austen socialized with him when she was in London. On one occasion they dined ‘tete a tete’, much to Jane’s amusement, as Seymour seems to have had a crush on her.9 He even visited her at Chawton in 1816. He later told a story of how he spent a whole carriage ride in Jane Austen’s company, from London to Chawton in a post-chaise, trying to decide whether to ask her to marry him or not. In the event, he did not.

  After her success in selling ‘Susan’ to a well-regarded London publisher, Austen set to work on two further stories: a new novel about a family called the Watsons and an epistolary novella about a charisma
tic villain called Lady Susan.

  Imagine an alternative scenario in which Crosby stuck to his word and published ‘Susan’ in 1803 or 1804. Many of Crosby’s novels by women were published anonymously, as ‘Susan’ would have been. But the identity of female authors was often an open secret within the literary world. Jane Austen’s name would have begun to circulate among the people who mattered. She would have become known as a witty Bath author, a gifted satirist of both literary fashion and spa-town life. Buoyed by her success, she might have completed The Watsons and Lady Susan, then polished up ‘First Impressions’ and ‘Elinor and Marianne’. She could have had five published novels by 1810 instead of none before 1811.

  These two transitional works, Lady Susan and The Watsons (both titles were provided by her family after her death), reveal a lot about the development of Jane Austen’s art.

  Some scholars believe that Lady Susan was drafted in 1794 or 1795, after the completion of the vellum notebooks, then revised in fair copy, with a new conclusion, in about 1805. The surviving manuscript, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, is on paper with a watermark of that date. But there is no definitive evidence for an early date: other Austen scholars believe that Lady Susan was an entirely new work belonging to the years following the submission of ‘Susan’ to Crosby. Either way, it is curious that, while waiting for the proofs of ‘Susan’ to arrive, she should have made a fair copy of a story about an anti-heroine with the same name.

  Lady Susan is Austen’s only extant epistolary novel of substance. It was an important transitional work – a serious trial of the ‘novel in letters’ form that had been pioneered by Richardson and adopted by Burney in her debut fiction, Evelina. As with Richardson’s Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison it has multiple letter-writers, allowing Austen to experiment with a variety of male and female voices, ranging from the cruel wit of Lady Susan to the kindly words of her morally superior sister-in-law Mrs Vernon. Unusually for Jane Austen, she also gets inside the head of an intelligent, strong hero, Reginald de Courcy, who, against his judgement and principles, falls in love with the sexually dominant widow.