Traditionally Jane Austen’s biographers have nailed together the established facts of her life—her birth, her travels, her enthusiasms, her death—and clothed this rickety skeleton with speculation gleaned from the novels, an exercise akin to ransacking an author’s bureau drawers and drawing conclusions from piles of neatly folded handkerchiefs or worn gloves. In so doing, the assumption is made that fiction flows directly from a novelist’s experience rather than from her imagination. The series of troubled families in the Austen novels, for instance, has been seen as a reflection of Jane Austen’s own presumably disordered domestic space. It is easy enough, after reading the novels, to imagine fierce sibling rivalry in the Austen clan or even the petty irritations that accumulate when numbers of adults and children are confined during the course of a few rainy days. But to employ the word “dysfunctional” when describing the Austens points to a parallel difficulty in which contemporary ideas and terms are perceived as being timeless. They are not. The late-eighteenth-century mind did not work along the same track as ours today, and I have attempted in this short life of Jane Austen to read into my own resistance, instead of seeking a confirmation or denial embedded in the fiction.
Jane Austen was born in the remote Hampshire village of Steventon, with its fewer than thirty families, on the sixteenth of December 1775. Her parents, George Austen, Rector of Steventon, and his wife, Cassandra Leigh Austen, belonged to what was then called the lesser gentry. The couple was not, in their early years, or perhaps ever, economically secure, but their level of education and family connections meant that they were not at a disadvantage when set beside their wealthier neighbors.
The continuance of the Austen family line was a concern, but it is unlikely that the Austens, George and Cassandra, were disappointed that their seventh child should be a girl. The rectory was full of little boys, all born in quick succession, and Jane was welcomed as a playmate for the Austens’ only other daughter, two-year-old Cassandra.
No doctor was required for the birth—in fact, there was no doctor in the village—but Mrs. Austen was undoubtedly attended by her sister-in-law Philadelphia, who was visiting at the time, along with Aunt Philadelphia’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Eliza. The winter that followed was exceptionally long and bitter according to surviving records, and probably it was this hardship that postponed young Jane’s formal christening until the spring of 1776.
Her first months were spent indoors, snug at the breast of her mother. Mrs. Austen’s parenting ideas were unorthodox, for unlike many contemporaries of her class, she believed in breast-feeding her babies for a few months in order to give them a good start. After weaning, though, the children were placed in the hands of a local family, probably the Littleworth family at nearby Cheesedown Farm, until they reached what Mrs. Austen considered to be the age of reason, that is until they could walk and talk and demonstrate a measure of sturdy independence.
The length of time during which Jane would have been fostered out is not known, but it can be imagined that the abrupt shift from mother’s breast to alien household made a profound emotional impact on the child. This early expulsion from home was the first of many, and it is doubtful whether she had much to say about such later separations, just as she had little power over her other domestic arrangements. Sharing a bedroom all her life, she was denied the “heaven” that Emily Dickinson found in her solitary upstairs space. Her fictional expression can be imagined as a smooth flow of narrative deriving from her confined reality, but a flow that is interrupted by jets of alternate possibility, the moment observed and then repositioned and recharged.
More and more, to the contemporary sensibility, it seems that the true subject of serious fiction is not “current events,” ongoing wars or political issues, but the search of an individual for his or her true home. Men and women, in fiction and in life, become separated from their home; in the novels of Jane Austen they are misdirected or misassigned, so that home, both in its true and metaphorical sense, becomes a desired but denied destination. At the same time Jane Austen herself must often have felt almost more homeless when she was restricted to home than when she was banished from it.
The sensitive (some would say pious) Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is born, it would appear, into a family of aliens—a drinking father, an indifferent mother—and must do with this situation what she can. Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice is, though she doesn’t put it quite so plainly, ashamed of her parents, possessing a sensibility that seeks its fulfillment in the creation of a new home with Darcy. Emma Woodhouse can be thought of as a half orphan, unable to grow up until she finds a path to making a home of her own. And Jane Austen herself, laboring over her brilliant fictions, creates again and again a vision of refuge furnished with love, acceptance, and security, an image she herself would be able to call a home of her own.
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JANE AUSTEN CHOSE to focus her writing on daughters rather than mothers (with the exception of her short and curious novel Lady Susan), but nevertheless mothers are essential in her fiction. They are the engines that push the action forward, even when they fail to establish much in the way of maternal warmth. Daughters achieve their independence by working against the family constraints, their young spirits struck from the passive, lumpish postures of their ineffectual or distanced mothers. Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), the most transparent example, is everything that her foolish mother is not. The feeble Mrs. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility leans on her three daughters rather than supporting them; the good woman is respected, but we know, and Jane Austen knows, that she is powerless. Emma’s mother is an absence, a vague memory, as one would expect the enfeebled spouse of Mr. Woodhouse to be, and Emma’s mothering has been handed over to a hired surrogate, Mrs. Weston, who not surprisingly wants to have a life and a child of her own—even though this leaves the hapless, ill-equipped Emma attempting to mother the whole village of Highbury with her plots and dramas. Northanger Abbey, which can be read as a coming-of-age novel, shows Mrs. Morland to be a good but rather casual mother, neglecting the matter of her daughter Catherine’s moral development and such important issues as how to distinguish the real world from its romantic shadow. And Lady Russell, Anne Elliot’s well-meaning, prudent surrogate mother in Persuasion, actively interferes, urging Anne to reject her suitor, Captain Wentworth, and thereby launching the novel’s action.
A close bond between mothers and daughters is rare in the Austen novels, but then mothering styles are forever in a state of change. The sentimental, smothering mother of Victorian fiction had not yet evolved. Childhood, too, has its different modes and expectations, and it was almost certainly shorter in the eighteenth century than it is today, with a brief period of innocent dependency followed by rapid absorption into adult society.
Of Jane Austen’s mother we know only a little. She was an accomplished versifier all her life, delighting in rhymes and rhythm, and her light verse, even after all these years and even considering the private references, still gives pleasure. Suggested glimpses of hypochondria or peevishness envelop her in later life—each of these glimpses gestures toward and secures a hundred others, as is often the case when biographical documentation is scarce. Jane Austen, in her final illness, reports she was too weak to walk upstairs and so she sometimes rested on three sitting-room chairs lined up together, leaving the sofa for her mother. What can we make of this improbable scene? Did her mother not notice the unusual furniture deployment? Or was Jane Austen in the full throes of a bizarre martyrdom? Were the mother and daughter playing out an old and rivalrous claim? Or was Mrs. Austen—and this is the interpretation that has hardened in the record—a demanding and self-absorbed woman, careless of her daughter’s comfort and too insensitive to see the signs of serious illness?
Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, in what looks like a dropped comment but which, examined, holds an armful of meaning: “I like the Gown very much & my Mother thinks it very ugly.” The balance of that particular sentence sugges
ts an imbalance of sensibility. The repetition of the word “very” forms a kind of code that Cassandra would be sure to understand. Mrs. Austen was geared to opposition, to stances that were negative.
We do know she was a strong, clever woman from a slightly higher ledge of the gentry than her husband, that she was occasionally caustic in the verses she wrote, and later, like Mrs. Bennet, was anxious about her unmarried daughters. But how could she not have been, and have we as readers been completely fair to Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice ? A good marriage was the only real hope for young women of Mrs. Bennet’s class, though marriage, with its new dangers and surrenders, often presented a form of martyrdom. Mrs. Bennet, always broadly played on the screen, may, in fact, be something of a solid realist, embedded in her economic matrix, concerned, and with Darwinian reason, about her nest of unmarried daughters. Her husband, on the other hand, affectionately put forward in film, is seen on close textual inspection to be foolish in his own particularly fastidious and reluctant manner. His wife urges him to call on the newly arrived, large-fortuned Mr. Bingley, but he turns this advice away with sarcastic humor and reserve, and yet we suspect—we know!—he is going to make that call. He is, after all, the straitened father of five daughters; he understands as well as Mrs. Bennet that the call is necessary.
Mrs. Bennet is also the only family member to welcome Lydia back home after her scandalous elopement. This cry of triumph has been interpreted as social pride on her part: At last she has one married daughter, at last she can hold up her head. But there is something of loyalty here as well: a mother’s rejoicing in a daughter’s happiness, a mother’s forgiveness of outrageous and shameful behavior, a generosity that prevails against the rest of the family’s hardness of heart. Even Elizabeth is immune to Lydia’s happiness, closer to being contemptuous and ashamed.
Mrs. Austen, Jane Austen’s mother, may or may not have had a spirit similar to Mrs. Bennet’s. However little we know about her, we can be certain she was a preoccupied woman, since an eighth child, Charles, followed not long after Jane’s birth, enlarging an already bursting household. The vegetable garden, the dairy—the family kept five cows—and the poultry yard would also have been among Mrs. Austen’s responsibilities, as was the supervision of enormous family meals.
The parsonage at Steventon, where Jane Austen was to live for the first twenty-five years of her life, was a large, respectable, but rather plain dwelling. The reception rooms on the ground floor showed their honest whitewashed beams, as well as a host of other architectural inelegancies, though the setting of the house, with its sundial, its flowers and hedgerows and rustic seats, was said to have been exceptionally charming.
Certainly the interior space was commodious enough to contain the boys’ boarding school run by the Austens. The Reverend George Austen, Jane’s father, was headmaster and sole teacher in the school, and Mrs. Austen supported the endeavor with her good will and practical assistance, overseeing the boys’ laundry and offering cheerful encouragement.
Mr. Austen was considered to be a handsome man and one who lived close to the ideal of a country gentleman, occupied with farm and parish duties, at the same time pursuing his scholarly and scientific interests. By all accounts he was a family man, a good father with a genuine interest in his offspring—he himself had been orphaned by the age of nine—and an admirable tolerance for his children’s differences, directing them down varying paths: the Church, the Admiralty, or in daughter Jane’s case, a life of literature. A farewell letter to his son Francis, off to the East Indies, survives, full of moral and practical advice, mild in tone, yet loving in its construction. Prudence, he told Francis, “will teach you the proper disposal of your time and the careful management of your money—two very important trusts.” (This letter from father to son was found with Francis’s papers when he died in his nineties, much creased and worn from rereading, a testimony of respect and love.)
The number of students at Steventon was small enough to make the school a family enterprise. Mr. Austen supervised the boys’ Greek and Latin in the parlor, to the accompaniment of everyday domestic buzz, visitors coming and going, and the younger children tumbling about. A household of this size, the ten Austens along with their four or five student boarders, ensured a lively ambience and what was most certainly an atmosphere of boisterousness and perhaps, for the young Jane, even ravishing happiness. Boys’ games, boys’ jokes, boys’ inevitable horseplay—all this made the Austens different from the more restrained families of their acquaintance, and young Jane and Cassandra were undoubtedly offered liberties that other girls were denied. They would have shared, too, in the overspill of earnest scholarship—privy to their father’s library, invited to observe his globe of the world and peer at natural mysteries through his microscope.
Jane Austen, describing the childhood of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, might be touching on her own early years of lightly supervised freedom, years of being “noisy and wild,” of playing with balls instead of dolls, of rainy days spent in the barn and family theatricals shared with the wider neighborhood. Such a childhood may well have given her understanding and sympathy for the way in which young male energy is transformed into gentleness and gallantry, a characteristic of all her male heroes.
A childhood is shaped by the presence or nonpresence of siblings. Jane Austen’s sister and six brothers, all of whom lived to adulthood, made her the person she was, a privileged observer of close family connections and inevitable conflicts. In addition to the immediate family there were engaging, affectionate neighbors who took an interest in the young Austens. Letters arrived from Aunt Philadelphia, bringing a whiff of a more cosmopolitan world. The seasons came and went; Christmas 1782, when Jane was seven, was celebrated with a play, Matilda, put on by the older Austen boys, the first of many family theatricals.
On the whole it can be said that warmth and respect marked the Austen household, but at the same time the family structure was slowly changing. The first son, James, ten years older than Jane, enrolled at Oxford in 1779, leaving some breathing space for the newly born Charles. Another brother, Edward, formed an attachment with the wealthy, distantly related Thomas Knight family of Godmersham, an arrangement that would eventually lead to his formal adoption. A farm refuge was found for another brother, George, who suffered from an unknown disability, probably a form of brain damage or deafness or both.
The idyllic life at Steventon ended abruptly when it was decided that Jane, aged seven, should be sent away to boarding school along with Cassandra and their cousin, Jane Cooper. Whether this decision was made with reflection or through lack of thought is not known, but the transition from country to city life can only have been shocking to so young a child; from rural Hampshire she went to Oxford, and later Southampton, as a pupil in a school run by Mrs. Cawley, whom the family knew only casually. The loss of freedom and the sense of banishment were imprinted on young Jane, and she spoke scathingly of girls’ schools and school-mistresses for the rest of her life. Rescue came in the form of an illness, referred to as a “putrid fever,” which sent both sisters home to their indulgent parents.
After a brief interlude the two sisters were sent away once again, this time to the Abbey School in Reading, romantically situated in a ruined twelfth-century monastery where the headmistress, Mrs. La Tournelle, spoke not a word of French, despite her name. Other mistresses did teach a little French as well as some drawing and needlework, and almost certainly dancing. The doors of universities were closed to females, and girls’ education in Jane Austen’s time consisted of what might be called “accomplishments.” The atmosphere of the Abbey School was relaxed, even indolent, and might well have resembled Mrs. Goddard’s School in Emma, a harmless social construct in which young girls were exposed to healthful food, outdoor exercise, and a less than rigorous academic program. Such establishments served a need in their time. Progressive families were often unguided about what to do with their bright young daughters, who required the connection wit
h learning but not the expectations that might follow. Mr. Austen, perhaps, thought the curriculum at the Abbey School too light for the amount of tuition he was paying; he brought both girls home near the end of 1786, shortly before Jane’s eleventh birthday, marking the end of her formal education.
At home conditions were more invigorating than at any girls’ school. There were interesting new neighbors, particularly Anne Lefroy, a spirited, learned woman, enormously admired by young Jane Austen. Jane’s oldest brother, James, still at Oxford, was often at home, producing ambitious theatricals in the barn, and it is quite possible that Jane took a role in an enactment of Sheridan’s The Rivals. More interesting yet was the arrival at Christmas, 1786, of Jane’s French-speaking cousin Eliza, who had been born in India to Philadelphia Austen Hancock, and was now married herself to a French count, Jean de Feuillide, and the mother of an infant son, Hastings. The household at Steventon was transformed during the visit of these exotic relations by a dose of French worldliness that affected all the Austens and enchanted, especially, young Jane. French manners, French books, French attitudes widened the intellectual and social reach of the family, enlivening routine life.
There were more family theatricals in the following years, in which Jane almost certainly took part. And, at the same time, she was reading. Everything we know about the family tells us that her reading was likely to have been unsupervised and random. Her father’s bookshelves would have been open to her, and probably this good-hearted, busy man did not trouble to direct her choices. There existed very little that might be called children’s writing, and so she plunged directly into the adult world of letters. Not much is known about what she read, except for Dr. Johnson’s essays from The Rambler and La Fontaine’s Fables choisies in French, brought to her as a gift by her cousin Eliza.
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