The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  While Henrietta rattles away about the health benefits of the sea and air, Anne shows quiet amusement at her passion, but as she ascends the steps ‘leading upwards from the beach’ she is openly admired by William Walter Elliot. The point here is that we see through his eyes the veracity of the clichés that Henrietta has been spouting, for the sea air has benefited Anne: ‘She was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced.’26

  It is also at the sea’s edge, and as a backdrop to Louisa’s fall from the Cobb, that Anne and Captain Benwick discuss poetry. In a detail to appeal to her publisher John Murray, Austen says that Lord Byron’s ‘dark blue seas’ from The Corsair ‘could not fail of being brought forward by their present view’:

  O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,

  Our thoughts as boundless, and our soul’s as free

  Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,

  Survey our empire, and behold our home!27

  Most famously, Lyme is the scene of the sickening accident which almost kills Louisa Musgrove, the fall from the precipitous steps of the Cobb – the old stone jetty – when she is jumped by Wentworth. The fall, foreshadowed by the ‘bad fall’ suffered by little Charles Musgrove earlier in the novel, causes a serious head injury, and is a turning point in the plot.

  Persuasion is full of damaged characters. There are those who have been deeply affected and afflicted by life’s events, such as the invalid Mrs Smith, Captain Benwick, even Anne. There are physical accidents, ranging from the commonplace to the serious. Admiral Croft suffers from gout. Captain Harville has been injured at sea and is lame. Charles Musgrove breaks his collar-bone and his family fear spinal damage. Louisa suffers that head injury. Then there are those who are spiritually damaged, such as William Walter Elliot, ‘black of heart, hollow and black’.28

  Jane Austen moves the action from the spa town to the seaside, reflecting an important trend in the health and leisure industries. Weymouth became one of the first modern tourist destinations after King George III’s brother the Duke of Gloucester built a grand residence there, Gloucester Lodge, to pass the winters in the mild climate. The King himself made Weymouth his summer-holiday residence on fourteen occasions between 1789 and 1805. When Henry, Eliza and Cassandra left Lyme for Weymouth, hoping to see the royal family, Jane wrote, ‘I was in some measure prepared; and particularly for your disappointment in not seeing the Royal Family go on board Tuesday’29 – the Austens had arrived too late to see the King board the Royal Yacht. Jane professed to show little interest in Weymouth or the royals: ‘Weymouth is altogether a shocking place I perceive, without recommendations of any kind and worthy only of being frequented by the inhabitants of Gloucester.’30

  Brighton was the seaside destination of choice for the Prince Regent. He had commissioned the Royal Pavilion, which was transformed by Nash in the exotic oriental style beloved of the Prince. Brighton is the dissipated backdrop for the sexually active Lydia Bennet: ‘that gay bathing place’ is where she elopes with Wickham.

  In Jane Austen’s novels, the raffish seaside resorts associated with the royal family and their hangers-on are the places offstage where meetings with unfortunate consequences take place. In Mansfield Park Weymouth is the backdrop for Tom Bertram’s disastrous meeting with John Yates, who later elopes with Tom’s sister, and it is the place where Frank Churchill meets and becomes engaged to Jane Fairfax in Emma. ‘I am really very glad that we did not go there,’ Austen says of the Weymouth excursion in 1804, and indeed we do not go there in the novels.

  ‘Bathing Place, Morning Dresses’ from The Gallery of Fashion (September 1797): rear view of ladies in bonnets, on a clifftop looking out to sea, with bathing machines below.

  The diversion to Lyme in Persuasion clearly whetted her appetite for writing about the seaside. As soon as she finished Persuasion she began a new novel that she thought she would call ‘The Brothers’. The action is set in a fictional resort on the Sussex coast, somewhere between Hastings and Eastbourne (Bexhill, as it might now be?). It is called Sanditon, and that was the title given to the unfinished novel by the scholar R. W. Chapman when he published the manuscript in full for the first time in the 1920s.

  Sanditon is a brilliant and evocative depiction of a newly emerging seaside community, replete with property developers encouraging tourism by transforming fishermen’s cottages into boarding houses and constructing modern houses on the hillside overlooking the sea. The new-builds have modish names such as Trafalgar House and there are plans for the construction of a crescent, to be named after Waterloo. There are shops (Whitby’s, Jebb’s and Heeley’s, displaying ‘blue shoes and nankin boots in the shop window’) and a garden centre, Stringer’s, where tourists can buy fruit and vegetables. Further away from the village, up on The Hill, where Mr Parker has built his new house, is a cluster of new shops and facilities, a library containing its own smaller shopping mall, a terrace for walking, a milliner’s for acquiring the latest headwear and a hotel and billiard room. From here it’s an easy walk to the beach ‘and to the bathing machines’ that colourfully line the shore’s edge.

  The heroine, newly arrived in Sanditon, is invigorated by the energy of the place as she stands at her ‘ample Venetian window’ looking over the ‘miscellaneous foreground of unfinished Buildings, waving Linen, and tops of Houses, to the Sea, dancing and sparkling in Sunshine and Freshness’.31 The surviving fragment is full of such pacy prose. It reads like an early Victorian novel, bursting with a range of fascinating characters and exuding vitality, a mix of delight in and scorn for the march of progress. There is a myth that Persuasion was Jane Austen’s autumnal valedictory novel, that she knew she was dying, but Sanditon suggests otherwise.

  The ‘Brothers’ are Tom, Sidney and Arthur Parker. Tom, open-hearted and gregarious, is the man dedicated to popularizing Sanditon. Though he is happily married, ‘Sanditon was a second Wife and four Children to him – hardly less Dear – and certainly more engrossing – He could talk of it forever.’32 Part of the reason he loves the seaside is that he belongs to a family of hypochondriacs, in particular his two sisters, who are ‘sad invalids’, and his youngest brother, Arthur, who is described as delicate but is in fact a lazy glutton. Sanditon is Tom Parker’s ‘Lottery, his Speculation and his Hobby-Horse’. Austen’s gift for free indirect discourse – animating the voices of her characters while keeping her own narrative voice coolly detached from them – is given free rein here. Tom Parker talks like a promotional advertisement:

  The Sea air and Sea Bathing together were nearly infallible, one or other of them being a match for every Disorder, of the Stomach, the Lungs or the Blood; They were anti-spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, antisceptic, anti-bilious and anti-rheumatic. Nobody could catch cold by the Sea, Nobody wanted Appetite by the Sea, Nobody wanted Spirits, Nobody wanted Strength … if the Sea breeze failed, the Sea-Bath was the certain corrective, and where Bathing disagreed, the Sea Breeze alone was evidently designed by Nature for the cure.33

  The Parker sisters, Diana and Susan, are intriguing characters. When we meet Diana, she is indeed obsessed with health but is disillusioned with conventional medicine: ‘We have entirely done with the whole Medical tribe.’ The sisters now physic themselves (‘self-doctoring’) homeopathically with herbal teas and home-made tonics or ‘bitters’. Their relationship to food is particularly interesting: ‘Susan never eats,’ says Diana, and ‘I never eat for about a week after a Journey.’34

  Charlotte, the novel’s clear-eyed heroine, decides that ‘Some natural delicacy of Constitution … with an unfortunate turn for Medecine, especially quack Medecine’, has indeed harmed the sisters’ physical health, but ‘the rest of their suffering was from Fancy’.35 When she first meets them her eyes are drawn to the numerous bottles of salts and drops which line the mantelpiece. Tea is served in
several different pots, since they have a large selection of ‘herb-tea’. They eat only dry toast and sip dishes of strong green tea. The seaside always attracts people drawn to an alternative lifestyle, as well as the elderly, the sick and the transient.

  The Parkers diagnose their own ill-health as being psychologically linked to nerves and hysteria. Charlotte, all good sense and the picture of ‘Youth and bloom’, advises, ‘As far as I can understand what nervous complaints are, I have a great idea of the efficacy of air and exercise for them, daily, regular Exercise.’36

  Diana Parker is drawn to other invalids, such as the delicate girl from the West Indies, Miss Lambe. On Miss Lambe’s behalf she secures lodgings in Sanditon and makes deals with the dippers for sea-bathing. She vows that she will accompany Miss Lambe in ‘taking her first Dip. She is so frightened, poor Thing, that I promised to come and keep up her Spirits, and go in the Machine with her if she wished it.’37 A mixed-race girl and a woman with batty views on medicine and diet, together in a bathing machine on a Sussex beach: this is not our usual image of Jane Austen’s novels.

  The other main plot-line in Sanditon involves the heirs of a rich dowager, Lady Denham, a brother–sister duo who have come to the resort to ingratiate themselves with her. At the time when Jane was writing the novel, the Austen family were anxiously awaiting news of their own inheritance from Mr Leigh-Perrot. The subject was very much on Jane Austen’s mind. She was also concerned about a lawsuit that someone was bringing against Edward Austen, challenging his Knight inheritance. The Austen women were very much aware that they could lose their home. Much of their future security depended upon their uncle’s will. Jane’s health was declining, and the stress did not help.

  In Sanditon there are two factions in the battle for Lady Denham’s inheritance. Sir Edward Denham and his sister stand in one corner and in the other is the lovely but poor Clara Brereton. Sir Edward is one of Jane Austen’s most interesting rakes. He plans to seduce his rival Clara. His other more extreme plan, should she fail to respond to his charms, is to abduct and presumably force himself upon her. Sir Edward self-consciously models himself on Samuel Richardson’s wicked monster Lovelace, who abducts and rapes Clarissa Harlowe. He reads Richardson, and specifically Clarissa, to inflame his ardour and add an ‘incentive to Vice’: ‘His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned and most exceptionable parts of Richardson … so far as Man’s determined pursuit of Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling and convenience.’

  His ‘great object in life’, we are told, ‘is to be seductive … he felt that he was formed to be a dangerous Man – quite in the line of the Lovelaces … it was Clara whom he meant to seduce. Her seduction was quite determined upon … if she could not be won by affection, he must carry her off. He knew his business.’38 He plans ‘ruin and disgrace for the object of his affections’. That Clara is a version of Clarissa ‘young, lovely and dependant’ is made clear. That her fate may be the same is suggested in the final pages of Sanditon when Charlotte discovers them alone in the outer boundaries of Sanditon House.

  But we will never know if Sir Edward abducted and raped Clara, or if he was all talk and no action. Nor will we know whether or not Charlotte married Sidney Parker. Anna Austen recalled having conversations about Sanditon with Jane in her final months, but was not told how the novel would end. Austen had began Sanditon in January 1817, but had a serious relapse in early March. She had not been well since July 1816. The two plotlines of Sanditon, inheritance and health, intruded into her own life. Her interest in the relationship between physical and psychological health became all too real when she heard the news of her uncle’s will.

  Mr Leigh-Perrot died on 28 March 1817, and left everything to his wife. The Austens were expecting an inheritance, particularly Jane’s mother and James Austen, who was the childless Leigh-Perrot’s heir. They would now have to wait until the death of Mrs Leigh-Perrot to receive a penny of their legacy. The news caused Jane to collapse. She begged Cassandra, who was away, to return home: ‘I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle’s Will brought on a relapse, and I was so ill … that I could not but press for Cassandra’s return … I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak Body must excuse weak nerves.’39 This has an added poignancy given her remarks in Sanditon about the connection between ‘weak bodies’ and ‘nerves’. She would have had no way of knowing that Addison’s Disease, from which she was probably suffering, appears to be linked specifically to stress.40 In Addison’s Disease, or hypocortisolism, the adrenal glands, located just above the kidneys, don’t make enough of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol’s most important function is to help the body respond to stress. Today the disease is treated successfully with hydrocortisone, a steroid hormone. Extra doses are given at times of stress known as an ‘Addisonial crisis’.

  The first shock she experienced was in March 1816, when her brother Henry’s bank collapsed. This seems to have precipitated her Addison’s. If her second Addisonial crisis was the family’s exclusion from the will, it is particularly poignant that women’s financial insecurity, of which she wrote so brilliantly in her novels, undermined her health so badly. Henry’s financial disaster coupled with those of the Leigh-Perrot will and her uncertainty about Edward’s ongoing lawsuit most certainly exacerbated her condition. Fresh sea air and exercise could no longer save her. On 24 May 1817, Cassandra took her fast-fading sister to Winchester for better medical treatment than that available at Chawton. Jane died eight weeks later.

  EPILOGUE

  She is sitting on the ground out of doors dressed in light blue, shaded by a tree and looking into an empty space. She is drawn from behind, so we cannot see her face. We will never know what was concealed beneath the elegant bonnet. What we do know is that this is the only incontestably authentic surviving portrait of Jane Austen.1

  It is a watercolour drawing signed C.E.A., the initials of her beloved sister, Cassandra Elizabeth Austen, and dated 1804, when Jane would have been twenty-eight. Its origin was described over half a century later in a letter from Jane and Cassandra’s niece Anna Lefroy, written to James Edward Austen-Leigh in 1862, when he was gathering material for his memoir: ‘a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her in one of their expeditions – sitting down out of doors on a hot day, with her bonnet strings untied’.2 This is not Aunt Jane sitting in a quiet room, concealing her writing upon hearing the creak of a door. It is a woman out on an expedition, in company with the person she loves more than anyone else in the world. The image is wonderfully evocative of the outdoor Austen, of such scenes in the novels as the strawberry-picking party or the trip to Box Hill in Emma. However, by not revealing her face it creates a sense of mystery as to the novelist’s true appearance.

  Her face was unknown to her original public. There was no engraving of her in the press at the time of her death, no frontispiece to the brief biographical notice that her brother published in 1818 with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Fifteen years after Austen’s death, a publisher of popular classics called Richard Bentley decided to reprint Sense and Sensibility in his collection of Standard Novels. He asked the family if there was an image of her that he could use as a frontispiece. A letter from Henry Austen to Bentley, dated 4 October 1832, gives a very interesting answer: ‘When I saw you in London, I mentioned that a sketch of her had been taken – on further enquiry, and inspection, I find that it was merely the figure and attitude – The countenance was concealed by a veil – nor was

  there any resemblance of features intended – it was a “Study”.’ Henry presumably consulted his sister Cassandra and she may well have shown him the sketch drawn from behind.

  Jane Austen remains the most elusive of all our great writers with the exception of Shakespeare – the one author to whom, according to her admiring early reviewers, she stands second, and another figure whose image, like Austen’s, is a matter of fierce controversy. Austen left no intimate diaries or revelatory notebooks. The vast majority
of her letters are lost. Correspondence is infuriatingly lacking in so many key periods – residence in Bath, the two years leading up to her first appearance in print, the moment of her move from Egerton to Murray. Besides, the novels and the letters are so full of irony and playfulness that her real feelings and beliefs can never be fully pinned down. She keeps her face turned away from us.

  In the end, then, it is fitting that the only irrefutably authentic image of the real Jane Austen is Cassandra’s sketch of her back. Yet this sketch reveals more than has been realized by previous biographers. The context in which Anna Lefroy described its origin was a question about Jane Austen’s travels. ‘She was once I think at Tenby – and once they went as far north as Barmouth – I would give a good deal, that is as much as I could afford, for a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her in one of their expeditions – sitting down out of doors on a hot day, with her bonnet strings untied.’ This is not any expedition, but a very specific one: a trip to the seaside on one of those family holidays during the Bath years.

  Charmouth was especially favoured by sea-bathers. Warmed by the Gulf Stream, the sea is relatively temperate. In Persuasion, Mary Musgrove bathes there. Charmouth did not boast fashionable pleasures, but was a place for lovers of nature. Its elevated position meant that it commanded particularly good views. Rising steeply above the golden sands are Stonebarrow Hill and Golden Cap, whose cliffs are the highest point on the south coast of Great Britain. From the green and golden cliffs the views stretching out over Lyme Bay are spectacular. Walkers are encouraged to ascend the cliffs and to sit and contemplate the expanse of sea below.