In a notebook Mr. Austen presented to the young Jane, he provided a title for its eventual contents: “Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady Consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new.” In this highly compressed, carefully constructed dedication, Mr. Austen gestures toward all that characterized his daughter’s early writing; he reminds her, and perhaps himself, of her extreme youth, her tendency toward effusion and fancifulness, and at the same time he recognizes her uniqueness of style, her novelty of approach. This literary daughter of his had more than ordinary promise.
The fatherly inscription is tender and knowing and without real mockery. It can only have encouraged Jane Austen to write more.
4
THE BUSY, BUSTLING LIFE of the Austens was changing. The house, in fact, was emptying out, with the Austen brothers going off in their separate directions. Francis was in the East Indies, pursuing what was to become a successful naval career, and Charles, the youngest Austen, was following in his footsteps. The charming Henry, Jane’s favorite brother, was studying at Oxford, and James was now curate in the vicarage at nearby Overton. And Edward (lucky Edward, adopted by the wealthy Knight family) was beginning his life as a landed gentleman and considering a most advantageous marriage. Jane, at home with her parents and her sister Cassandra, must have found herself in a debilitating vacuum. Was this to be her life then? Her brothers had entered the public world, while she and Cassandra were confined to domestic preoccupations and small social forays in the immediate neighborhood.
Some years earlier James had written a telling prologue to one of the family theatricals. Times have changed, proclaimed cousin Eliza, who read the piece at the performance. Women had been oppressed in the past:
But thank our happier Stars, those times are o’er
And woman holds a second place no more.
Now forced to quit their long held usurpation,
These Men all wise, these “Lords of the Creation,”
To our superior sway themselves submit,
Slaves to our charms and vassals to our wit;
We can with ease their ev’ry sense beguile,
And melt their Resolution with a smile . . .
Jane had just turned eleven when she sat listening to this curious and playful statement of emancipation, which can also be viewed as a sop tossed to women in exchange for what had been taken from them. Women’s power was locked up in their charm and wit, in their targeted, practiced smiles. And this putative power could only be manipulated through a man, one of those so-called “Lords of Creation.”
It cannot have been a surprise to such an observant child as Jane Austen that this kind of limited sway was all she was going to be allowed in her life, particularly when she would probably have been aware of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, and widely discussed everywhere, perhaps even in the Steventon vicarage, where it must have offered warning rather than encouragement. Her girlhood writing both supports this harsh truth about women’s lives and chafes against it, and her mature work, too, can be read as a demonstration of submissive women and the wiles they use to get their way—their pointed courtesies, quiet words of reproof, or directed glances. At the same time, the novels show men and women to be equal in intellect and moral apprehension. This is a great paradox, and one that Jane Austen appears to have swallowed, but cannot have failed to notice.
The reality of her situation as she approached the age of twenty must have been shocking. She had no profession, and none would be offered to her. Governessing, school teaching—there was little else for women in her position, and she scorned both. She was without money of her own, except for £20 allowance a year from her father, and this dispensed in quarterly lumps. It has been suggested by the contemporary scholar Edward Copeland that we calculate a Jane Austen pound as being equivalent to $100 US dollars today, which allows Jane an annual budget of $2,000 out of the family budget of £600, or $60,000, a comfortable family income, but not at all luxurious—not when a circular mahogany dining table with strap hinges, for example, cost £5.7.6., or almost $600, and a backgammon table was priced at £1.10.0., which would be more than $100 today.
Jane Austen’s visits away from home were arranged by others, and at their convenience rather than hers. She was, in fact, dependent on the good will of family and friends for all the requirements of life and must at times have imagined and projected herself forward into the pitiable state of a spinster, spooked even at this young age by the tiresome, embarrassing neediness of Miss Bates (Emma) or the determinedly cheerful Mrs. Smith (Persuasion) and their sadly disadvantaged sisters who populated novels, women trapped between social levels and prohibited by their precariously balanced intelligence from participation in active life. For them there were only the available tricks of charm and the plotted dramas of entrapment, the glance over the tea table that redirected action or else, with great kindness and cunning, drew men away from their paralyzed silence.
Meanwhile, at Steventon, she had her books, her pianoforte, and her needlework, an activity she seems to have taken seriously. And she had her writing, which from the ages of fifteen to seventeen engaged her fully. And she had her friends. Now that the family at home was dwindling, a small sitting room was set up for her sister and herself, and here they could entertain a circle of neighboring young women. With its chocolate carpet, its bookshelves and the pianoforte, the room must have seemed cramped but congenial. The work boxes of the two sisters were displayed, and probably Cassandra’s watercolors, too, and Jane’s writing desk, the emblems of their particular expression. New neighbors, the Lloyds, arrived in the district in 1789, and Jane became fast friends with Martha Lloyd, who, though she was ten years older, possessed a similarly animated spirit. The Bigg-Wither family, with three daughters, settled in a nearby manor house. The society of these new companions was diverting and congenial. Girlish talk held sway: clothes, books, dance steps, neighborhood gossip; giddy expeditions were planned: long walks or trips into Basingstoke. (These female relationships were important to Jane Austen, whose novels ring with the music of high spirits and feminine laughter.) By the age of seventeen she was attending local balls and becoming a practiced flirt. The writer Mary Russell Mitford described her unkindly as “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembered.” But where was all this leading?
The dramatic story of Jane Austen’s French relations, Aunt Philadelphia and her daughter Eliza, had always been present as a parallel strand in her life, as complex and filled with mystery and color as the most potent novel. Enough years had passed to melt the early part of the account into near legend. Philadelphia Austen, the sister of George Austen, had traveled alone to India in 1752, seeing that her only chance for a life was to find a rich husband. The ensuing marriage to the much older Tysoe Saul Hancock was not a happy one, and Philadelphia’s only daughter, Eliza, was probably fathered by the more dashing Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Eliza, a lifelong friend of Jane Austen, grew up to marry Jean Capot, Comte de Feuillide, an ambitious French entrepreneur who was guillotined in the bloody years following the French Revolution. A widow and the mother of a son, Eliza later married Henry Austen, Jane’s much adored brother, and became Jane’s sister-in-law.
This particular family narrative—Philadelphia the bold adventurer and her daughter Eliza—must have dazzled young Jane Austen with its romance and its international dimensions, and it is impossible to contemplate Austen’s life without taking so large a connection into account. From early childhood she knew she possessed an aunt who had risked everything at the age of twenty-two to go out to India, into unknown territory, where she re-created herself and her possibilities. Eliza’s history is equally dramatic—uncertain parentage, a marriage into French nobility, danger, tragedy, and finally a triumph of courage and a dash to safety within the embrace of the Austen family.
There was much visiting and letter writing between the two families after the return from India, a
nd there can be no doubt that Jane Austen’s imagination was stirred by the story of her aunt and cousin. We see a flicker of this kind of glamorized history and worldly intrigue in a girlhood work, Love and Friendship (dedicated to Eliza), in which one of the characters, Laura, gives a breezy account of her life:
My father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; My Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an Italian Opera-girl—I was born in Spain and received my Education at a Convent in France.
There is such a strong yearning for the exotic in this passage, such subversion of class and order! Jane Austen, bent over her needlework in the quiet of an English country rectory, was alive to the drama of her own extended family history and to her own unmet longings. Other women—family members, her own aunt and cousin—had seized their opportunities, risked their respectability, and claimed their future. What was she herself doing, other than scribbling away for the entertainment of the family and waiting for a husband to appear? And from where would that husband come? Candidates were sure to be in short supply, since neither of the Austen girls had a penny to bring to marriage, but still Jane dreamed of rescue. Once, idly, she covered a page of her father’s parish ledger with the names of fantasy husbands: “Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam,” “Edmund Arthur William Mortimer.” These were noble-sounding gentlemen with a ring of fortune about them. Then, out of a different longing, or perhaps terror, she wrote “Jack Smith,” to be married to “Jane Smith late Austen.”
Her life went on quietly. There were pleasant diversions, holidays with the family, visits from Eliza and her son, and preparations for the wedding of the Austen cousin, Jane Cooper. The officiating clergyman at this event was to be the handsome young Tom Fowle, whose family were old friends of the Austens and who had himself been a pupil in Mr. Austen’s rectory school. It was during this prewedding period that Tom and Cassandra became engaged.
Much of what we know about the relationship between the two Austen sisters derives from their correspondence, those periods during which they were separated. A letter, even to an intimate, brings another self forward, one that is more formalized and detached or else heightened and exaggerated. The letter writer’s persona is constructed and brought to artificial life, and there is in Jane Austen’s letters to her sister a witty, distracted performer at work, and one who longs to shorten the distance between herself and Cassandra by sharing the minutiae of daily life.
Their day-to-day relationship can only be guessed at, though Mrs. Austen is famous for saying that if Cassandra should cut off her head, so too would Jane. Quiet days spent together as they approached maturity are largely undescribed, and we tend to think of them as without event. Which is why the engagement of Cassandra comes with something of a thud in any account of Jane Austen’s life—we know so little about what led up to it, how it came to be.
And we can’t be sure what seventeen-year-old Jane thought about her only sister’s engagement. We do know that she composed for Cassandra a darkly romantic poem titled “Ode to Pity,” which fell rather short as a statement of sisterly rejoicing.
Ever musing, I delight to tread
The paths of honour and the myrtle grove Whilst the pale Moon her beams doth shed
On disappointed love.
Disappointed love? Whatever could she have meant? She also dispatched oddly worded messages of greeting to her newly born nieces, Anna and Fanny, the daughters of her brothers James and Edward; these missives were meant, perhaps, to be ironic, but the tone is heavy, almost bitter. Once again Jane Austen may have glimpsed the emptiness of the future. Her brothers were marrying and having children, and now her sister would be leaving home. She was relieved, probably, when the young couple, both of them penniless, postponed their marriage until Tom was on firmer financial ground. In the meanwhile he accepted a post as chaplain to a regiment headed in late 1795 for the West Indies, and the possibility of combat with the French.
Jane Austen’s writing output slowed down somewhat in her late teens when she seems to have been too occupied with the real business of romance and flirtation to spin mere fictions. But then, all at once, when she was about twenty, she completed a short novel, Lady Susan. Her father had given her a portable writing desk for her nineteenth birthday, a pretty thing of mahogany and leather, equipped with a glass inkstand and a drawer. The gift may have represented a kind of permission on her parent’s part, exactly what all young writers need if they are to continue in their pursuit. Or it may have been a suggestion—fatherly, kindly—that she distract herself by attention to her desk rather than to the wild flirting he had witnessed or heard about at recent balls. Lady Susan was the first piece she wrote at this new desk.
Her brothers, during this period, were engaged in combat at sea while she, at home at Steventon, pen in hand, brought to the page the only kind of combat a woman was allowed: the conquest of hearts and the overturning of domestic arrangements. The novel, never published during her lifetime, is her strangest and most unsettling literary offering and seems to have been unpopular with her family and friends. It is charmless. And very nearly pointless. Its form—a novel in letters—is not one that suited Jane Austen, whose own correspondence was familial and unfocused, with only occasional bursts of sparkle. She knew how to write a polite formal note, but in her letters to Cassandra she adopted early on a flighty, breathless persona, determinedly unserious and even appeasing, as though pleasing Cassandra, amusing Cassandra, was all that guided her pen. The plot of Lady Susan is very much off-the-shelf for its time: A wicked mother attempts to force her daughter into an unwanted marriage. Lady Susan is manipulative, cruel and selfish, abusive to her child, and traitorous to her friends, a predatory female of almost monstrous size. Her original marriage schemes are confounded, but she shows not the slightest degree of shame or self-awareness as a reader might have expected by the novel’s end, and Jane Austen does not mete out to her what would be an appropriate punishment. It may be that Austen half admired her creation’s mixture of cunning and sexual bravura; Lady Susan was at least capable of exercising power—even though this force was chiefly directed at breaking up homes and managing her daughter’s misery. The corrupt heart of Lady Susan gestures backward toward the juvenilia; Lady Susan’s lack of moral judgment looks ahead to Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park or even to the flawed Emma.
Jane Austen may have been merely “trying her hand” at a popular form in the same way that contemporary novelists sometimes take a flyer at a romance novel. She may have been touched by Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which was widely known at the time. Or perhaps she was teaching herself a new expressiveness; the materials of Lady Susan are flimsy, but the knit is tight. She had learned while writing Lady Susan about the novelist’s control. And she was soon to try something a good deal more ambitious.
5
IN 1795, just twenty years old, Jane Austen began a new epistolary novel about two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, who, like the Austen sisters, are without money and each of them longing for marriage. The two characters differ sharply in temperament. Marianne, the impulsive, swooning, impractical younger sister, is allied by her nature to the forces of true love and happiness. Elinor, the older sister, is on the side of prudence—acquiescence is closer to the mark—and modestly in love with an equally prudent young man whose family is totally opposed to a match with such an impecunious family. At this, Elinor can only shrug her agreement; she perfectly understands the importance of money and station, as Marianne does not. Jane Austen, writing to Cassandra, who was visiting her fiancé’s family at the time, allied herself with Marianne: “I write only for fame,” she said, “and without any view to pecuniary emolument.”
It is impossible to read this declaration without hearing a harsh note of self-mockery; the mention of the word “fame” by someone as unknown and isolated as the young Jane Austen requires an arch, undercutting tone that Cassandra would be able to interpret without the least hesitation. She might also understand, as a contemporary reader
of the letters does, that there is a sense in which Jane Austen meant what she said: She hungered for fame and may have felt, even at this stage of her development, deserving of it, knowing at the same time that such a yearning could not be expressed in anything other than an ironic voice. Her new effort, Elinor and Marianne, her longest novel yet, might just possibly serve as her introduction to the world. We know it as an early draft of Sense and Sensibility.
The manuscript was read to the family, although not one page of it has come down to us today. We recognize those familiar names and register the subject: two sisters of fundamentally different character searching for love and happiness, each in thrall to their very different loves. The novel is saved from the simplicity of allegory by the fact that Marianne’s sensibility and Elinor’s sense are not perfectly idealized or opposed; they are, each of them, a little silly and a little calculating. We have real sisters here, and not convenient contrarieties. Their devotion to each other pulls the novel’s sometimes tenuous structure tight.
But the embryo novel must have had a very different trajectory. An epistolary novel can only exist if its characters are separated from each other and obliged to correspond—this artificial construct is one of the problems with the novel-in-letters. In Sense and Sensibility, which abandoned the epistolary form for a third-person narrative, the two sisters are scarcely ever apart.
Jane Austen Page 4