by Paula Byrne
In Persuasion, Austen is deeply moved by Charmouth, ‘with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation’.3 If we had to hazard a guess as to which of Jane and Cassandra’s ‘expeditions’ they were on when the drawing was sketched, as good an answer as any would be one to Charmouth in August 1804, before Cassandra went on to Weymouth.
Austen is clearly sitting in an elevated position. Could a light wind from the sea be gently lifting the ribbons of her unloosened bonnet? Is she ‘watching the flow of the tide … in unwearied contemplation’? The blankness of the view beyond suggests that this is indeed a sea, not a country, view.
Two women, sisters and best of friends, are walking on the cliff tops on a hot summer’s day on the south coast of England. They sit down to rest. It is the year before Trafalgar. They have talked, as they do every day, about their two brothers who are away fighting the fiercest maritime war in history, risking their lives for the preservation of their nation. The elder sister takes out the watercolours that she has brought with her. Painting en plein air was a new fashion. She sketches her companion from behind. The bonnet of the beloved younger sister is untied, the strings blowing in the salty breeze. Jane Austen is looking out to sea.
INSERT
Prologue: Captain Harville’s View
1. The Family Profile
2. The East Indian Shawl
3. The Vellum Notebooks
4. The Subscription List
5. The Sisters
6. The Barouche
7. The Cocked Hat
8. The Theatrical Scenes
9. The Card of Lace
10. The Marriage Banns
11. The Ivory Miniature
12. The Daughter of Mansfield
13. The Crimson Velvet Cushions
14. The Topaz Crosses
15. The Box of Letters
16. The Laptop
17. The Royalty Cheque
18. The Bathing Machine
CREDITS
Chapter openers designed by Vera Brice
Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London: Copleston Warre Bampfylde’s watercolour of ‘Lyme Regis and the Dorsetshire Coast’; Bone Spelling Alphabet, English c.1800.
Courtesy of the David Collection, Copenhagen: square woollen shawl, made in Kashmir, c.1800 (inventory no. 26/1992), photo: Pernille Klemp.
Copyright Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library: high-perch sociable barouche carriage, from a collection of engravings of carriages published by R. Ackermann, 1816.
Courtesy of a private collector: card of French lace, probably manufactured in the English midlands.
Courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (MA 977.4). Photography by Schecter Lee: part of a letter from Jane to Cassandra Austen, 2 June 1799, with sketch of lace design.
Courtesy of Hampshire Record Office (71M82/PR3): Jane Austen’s ‘marriage’ entries in Steventon parish register.
From a private collection, copyright Philip Mould and Company: miniature of Mrs Lefroy by Richard Crosse.
From the collection of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace: portrait of Dido Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray, attributed to Zoffany.
Courtesy of the Board of Stoneleigh Abbey Limited: crimson velvet cushion in the family chapel at Stoneleigh; letter from Thomas Leigh to Thomas Hill; watercolour by Humphry Repton from his Stoneleigh Red Book. Photos: Tom Bate.
From a private collection, photograph copyright Sotheby’s: title page of presentation copy of Emma sent by Jane Austen to Maria Edgeworth.
Copyright The British Library Board: Jane Austen’s writing box; vellum notebook Volume the Second.
Courtesy of The National Library of Scotland (from the John Murray Archive): front and back of John Murray’s royalty cheque for Emma, countersigned by Jane Austen.
Courtesy of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust (Jane Austen’s House Museum): Anna (Austen) Lefroy’s sketch of the rear of Steventon rectory; miniature of Phila Hancock; watercolour of Fanny Knight writing; topaz crosses owned by Jane and Cassandra Austen; miniatures of George Austen and Henry Austen.
Courtesy of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock: cocked hat worn by Captain John Meadows of the Oxfordshire Militia.
Copyright Georgios Kollidas/Dreamstime.com: John Murray II (1778–1843), engraved by E. Finden and published in London by A. Fullarton.
Courtesy of The Royal Collection Trust, copyright HM Queen Elizabeth II, 2012: presentation set of Emma given to the Prince Regent.
Courtesy of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton: William Heath’s caricature ‘Mermaids at Brighton’ (1829).
Illustrations from J. H. and E. C. Hubback’s Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (1905), in the author’s personal collection: drawing of a ship by Herbert Austen; silhouette of Cassandra Austen; miniature of Captain Charles Austen; ‘Peterel in action with the French brig La Ligurienne, after driving two others on the rocks near Marseilles, on 21 March 1800’ sketched by Herbert Austen; miniature of Captain Francis Austen; ‘Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Austen KCB’s writing desk’ sketched by his daughter Cassandra.
Illustrations from Constance Hill’s Jane Austen: Her Homes and her Friends (1902), in the author’s personal collection: silhouette of ‘Rev George Austen presenting his son Edward to Mr and Mrs Thomas Knight’; sketch of hallway of Godmersham House; portrait miniature of Eliza de Feuillide; sketch of Jane Austen’s cup and ball; sketch of steps on the Cobb, Lyme Regis (sketches by Ellen G. Hill).
Illustrations from Jane Austen, Love and Freindship and other early works now first printed from the original manuscripts (1922), in the author’s personal collection: wording of dedication to ‘Love and Freindship’; Cassandra Austen’s sketches in Jane Austen’s ‘A History of England’.
Frontispiece to R. W. Chapman’s Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others (1932, repr. 1952), in the author’s personal collection: photograph, courtesy of Oxford University Press, of Cassandra Austen’s watercolour sketch of the back view of Jane Austen.
Original works in the author’s personal collection: first edition of Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796) and engraving of Fanny Burney; portrait of the Trevanion Sisters (c.1803) by unknown artist; George Cruikshank’s caricature ‘Travelling in England, or a peep from the White Horse cellar’ (1819); photograph of Steventon auction advertisement from the Reading Mercury (27 April 1801); Cruikshank engraving of ‘The Honourable Tom Dashall and his Cousin Bob, in the Lobby at the Drury Lane Theatre’ from Pierce Egan’s Real Life in London (1821); engraving by C. Heath after a painting by Howard of a scene in Lovers’ Vows (1816); engraving of Mrs Leigh Perrot; engraving of Bath Street (from Nattes’s Bath, 1806); title page of pamphlet The Trial of Jane Leigh Perrot (Taunton, 1800); caricatures by George Cruikshank of ‘Mr B on the Middle Watch’ and ‘Mr B Promoted to Lieut and first putting on his Uniform’ (1835); Cruikshank engraving of ‘The “ne plus ultra” of Life in London – Kate, Sue, Tom, Jerry and Logic viewing the throne room at Carlton Palace’ from Life in London (1822); graphite on vellum drawing of ‘Miss Jane Austin’, c.1815; photograph of engraving ‘Bathing Place, Morning Dresses’ from The Gallery of Fashion (September 1797).
All photographs from the author’s personal collection © Tom Bate.
Images in the public domain: title page of Byrne and Jones’s Dublin edition of The Loiterer (1792); title pages of Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813); engraving of Harris Bigg-Wither (released into the public domain from the family archive).
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders of images reproduced in this book, but will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.
NOTES
PROLOGUE: CAPTAIN HARVILLE’S CARPENTRY
1 The image is one of a series of delicate watercolour and pencil draw
ings of Lyme Regis and its environment, executed by Copleston Warre Bampfylde on a tour in 1784, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
2 Persuasion, 1.11.
3 Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (3rd edn, 1995), Letter 104, Aug 1814. All letters cited by month and Le Faye’s letter number.
4 Mary Lloyd to Anna Lefroy, 9 July 1829, quoted in William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, revised by Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record (1989), p. 237. Cited hereafter as Family Record.
5 Persuasion, 1.11.
6 Quoted, M. A. DeWolfe Howe, ‘A Jane Austen Letter, with Other “Janeana” from an Old Book of Autographs’, Yale Review, 15 (1925–6), pp. 319–35. All subsequent quotations from this correspondence are cited from the same source.
7 Letter 91, Oct 1813.
8 Letter 4, Sept 1796.
9 Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ (1818), repr. in J. E. Austen-Leigh: A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (2002), pp. 137–43. Cited hereafter as Memoir.
10 Almost every known fact has been gathered by the indefatigable Deirdre Le Faye in A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family 1700–2000 (2006), a work to which I am much indebted. Cited hereafter as Chronology.
11 The most thorough, reliable and judicious cradle-to-grave biography is Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (1987). Family Record also remains indispensable.
12 Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1992), p. 15.
13 The Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Edward, Lord Brabourne (1884), p. x.
14 Ibid., p. xi.
15 Quarterly Review, Oct 1815, repr. in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam (1968), pp. 58–69.
16 Edward Orme, An Essay on Transparent Prints and Transparencies in General (1807), quoted in British Critic, vol. 30 (Dec 1807), p. 688.
CHAPTER ONE: THE FAMILY PROFILE
1 Mary Augusta Austen Leigh, James Edward Austen Leigh: A Memoir by his Daughter (1911), p. 11. See also Sophia Hillan, May, Lou and Cass: Jane Austen’s Nieces in Ireland (2011), p. 56. On Wellings, Lavater and the art of the silhouette, see http://www.wigsonthegreen.co.uk/silhouettes_guide.html (accessed 16 June 2012).
2 Emma, 1.11.
3 This account was given by Anna Austen in her memoir ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’ (1864), quoted from J. E. Austen-Leigh: A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (2002), p. 160. Cited hereafter as Memoir.
4 Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Austen Papers, 1704–1856 (1940), pp. 32–3.
5 Letter 18, Jan 1799, adapting a phrase from Burney’s Camilla (1796), ‘my own particular little niece’ (vol. 4, p. 30), where the context is family separation.
6 Family Record, p. 20.
7 Austen-Leigh, Austen Papers, p. 27.
8 Letter of 23 Sept to 7 Nov 1772, ibid., pp. 64–8.
9 ‘I have all four at home’: Austen-Leigh, Austen Papers, pp. 27–8 (8 November 1772).
10 Another letter from Mrs Austen, dated 6 June 1773, mentions all the children in the house but not George, suggesting that he was boarded out earlier that year, at precisely the time when the Reverend George Austen began taking in boys.
11 See Thomas Bewley, Madness to Mental Illness: A History of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2008).
12 Letter 95, Nov 1813.
13 Letter 69, 26 July 1809.
14 See the excellent Linda Robinson Walker, ‘Why Was Jane Austen Sent Away to School at Seven? An Empirical Look at a Vexing Question’, Persuasions On-Line 26.1 (Winter 2005).
15 Austen-Leigh, Austen Papers, p. 28.
16 Letter 99, Mar 1814.
17 Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), vol. 1, pp. 364–5.
18 Letter 24, Nov 1800.
19 Letter 25, Nov 1800.
20 An early form of baseball was a popular game, especially for girls, in the late eighteenth century (compare modern rounders).
21 Memoir, p. 18.
22 Family Record, p. 46.
23 See Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes and her Friends (1902), p. 23.
24 William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record (1913), p. 25.
25 Emma, 1.3.
26 Letter 4, Sept 1796.
27 Henry Fielding had got under the skin of a boy in Tom Jones, a novel well known to Austen.
28 Mansfield Park, 1.2.
29 Ibid., 3.14.
30 William Cowper, Poetical Works with Notes and a Memoir (1785), vol. 2, p. 217.
31 ‘An inclination for the Country is a venial fault. – He [her brother Henry’s servant William] has more of Cowper than of Johnson in him, fonder of Tame Hares and Blank verse than of the full tide of existence at Charing Cross’: Letter 95, Nov 1813. Cowper wrote an epitaph on a pet hare.
32 Mansfield Park, 3.17.
33 Letter 53, June 1808.
CHAPTER TWO: THE EAST INDIAN SHAWL
1 Austen-Leigh, Austen Papers, pp. 57–8; Chronology, p. 51.
2 Letter of personal testamentary dispositions made at the same time as her will, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA4500; Chronology, p. 664.
3 Letter 15, Dec 1798; Letter 121, Oct 1815; Letter 19, May 1799.
4 Mansfield Park, 2.13.
5 ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, in Volume the Third, in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (2006), pp. 256–7. The Sabor edition, to which I am much indebted, is cited hereafter as Juvenilia.
6 Letter 153, Mar 1817.
7 Family Record, p. 3.
8 Quoted, Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (1974), p. 34.
9 ‘Catharine’, in Juvenilia, p. 257.
10 For further local colour, see Birds of Passage: Henrietta Clive’s Travels in South India 1798–1801, ed. Nancy K. Shields (2009).
11 Tysoe Hancock letterbook in Warren Hastings papers, British Library; quoted in Jane Austen’s ‘Outlandish Cousin’: The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (2002), p. 31. Cited hereafter as Eliza Letters.
12 Quoted, Bence-Jones, Clive of India, p. 220.
13 Quoted, Eliza Letters, p. 30.
14 Letter 87, Sept 1813.
15 Juvenilia, pp. 6, 92, 156.
16 Quoted, Eliza Letters, p. 29.
17 Quoted, ibid., p. 23.
18 Quoted, ibid., p. 26.
19 Ibid., p. 46.
20 Quoted in letters from John Woodman to Warren Hastings in India: Hastings Papers, British Library Add. MSS 29150, fo. 23; 29152, fo. 150.
21 Sense and Sensibility, 1.10.
22 Eliza Letters, p. 142.
23 Ibid., p. 62.
24 Ibid., pp. 88–9.
25 Family Record, p. 57.
26 Eliza Letters, p. 102.
27 Ibid., p. 112.
28 Ibid., p. 113.
29 See William Holland’s print ‘Prelude to Riots in Mount Street’, June 1792 (Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum).
30 Eliza Letters, p. 116.
31 Ibid., p. 118.
32 The Times, 10 Sept 1792.
33 Family Record, p. 53.
34 Quoted, Eliza Letters, pp. 85–6.
35 Quoted, ibid., p. 125.
36 Ibid., pp. 90, 95, 102, 119.
37 Warren Hastings pocketbook, 15 Mar 1794, BL Add. MSS 39882.
38 That is, 23 February 1794. Le Faye, in Eliza Letters and Chronology, mistakes the day of condemnation for that of execution: see Liste générale et très-exacte de tous ceux qui ont été condamnés à mort par le Tribunal révolutionnaire, vol. 2 (1795), prisoner no. 396.
39 Louis Prudhomme, Révolutions de Paris, dédiées à la nation (1794), p. 540, my translation.
40 See her biography in Prosper Jean Levot, Biographie Bretonne (1857).
41 Juvenilia, p. 278.
42 Ibid., p. 251.
43 Spelt ‘Catharine’ in the title, but nearly always ‘Catherine’ in the text.
44 Juvenilia, pp. 286–7.
45 Yea
rs later, Austen inserted here a reference to Hannah More’s moralistic novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife, published in 1809: this is evidence of the mature Austen’s continuing interest in her own early works.
46 Northanger Abbey, 1.14. Subsequent quotations from same chapter.
47 Cited in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2: 1870–1940, ed. Brian Southam (1996), pp. 87–8.
CHAPTER THREE: THE VELLUM NOTEBOOKS
1 MS Don.e.7, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Add. MSS 59874 and 65381, British Library, London. Detailed bibliographic description, facsimile and diplomatic transcription, ed. Kathryn Sutherland et al., at www.janeausten.ac.uk (accessed 11 July 2012), on which my account of the three volumes is based.
2 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, in The Common Reader (1925), pp. 168–72.
3 Juvenilia, p. 131.
4 Caroline Austen, ‘My Aunt Jane Austen’, in Memoir, p. 174.
5 The latest amendment was probably made in 1811, when she substituted ‘Regency Dress’ and ‘Regency Bonnet’.
6 Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741), Letter 2.
7 Juvenilia, p. 6.
8 Ibid.
9 The Oxford English Dictionary records instances going back to 1699.
10 Juvenilia, pp. 7, 12.
11 Ibid., p. 16.
12 Ibid., p. 18.
13 Ibid., p. 16.
14 Ibid., p. 38.
15 All’s Well that Ends Well, 4.3.70. One of the favourite Shakespearean quotations of Austen’s contemporary William Hazlitt.
16 Juvenilia, p. 150.
17 Ibid., p. 190.
18 In Peter Sabor’s superb Cambridge edition of the Juvenilia.
19 Ibid., p. 306.
20 Annotations to Goldsmith quoted from ibid., pp. 318–51.
21 ‘History of England’ quotations from ibid., pp. 176–89.
22 Ibid., pp. 353–5.
23 I owe this suggestion to ibid., p. 467.
24 James fell in love with Carr, when the latter was just seventeen. They remained close until their estrangement in 1615. James wrote a letter in which he complained that Carr had been ‘creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary’. See Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (2003), p. 387.