And something else intervened in the life of Jane Austen soon after she finished Marianne and Elinor and was perhaps considering a revised narrative approach: She fell in love, or at least what she took for a form of love.
There is a joke among novelists that in order to initiate strong action or to revive a wilting narrative it is only necessary to say: “And so a stranger came to town.” The arrival of a stranger, in fact, was the spark that ignited, and perhaps changed forever, the developing sensibility of Jane Austen.
It was January of the year 1796. Jane had just turned twenty. The stranger was Tom Lefroy, from Ireland, visiting relations at nearby Ashe parsonage before beginning his law studies in London. He was young, pleasant, good-looking, and had already taken a degree in Dublin. (All the heroes of Jane Austen’s mature novels are reading men, men of the book, and clever Tom Lefroy is no exception.) He and Jane Austen met only a few times, but they seemed to enjoy the same high spirits and sense of irony. Jane’s letters to Cassandra at this time show her to be thoroughly smitten, unable to restrain herself from repeated references to her “Irish friend.” Her spirits are effervescent as she reports on an evening spent with him at a local ball. “Imagine to yourself,” she confides boldly, “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” As usual, she cushions her enthusiasm with one of her typical throwaway gestures, claiming that Tom Lefroy’s one fault was that “his morning coat is a great deal too light,” and clearly she intended to correct this fault in exactly the lighthearted way by which women were permitted to bring men to a state of excellence. Tom Lefroy calls on her after the evening of “profligate” behavior, and their open discussion of the novel Tom Jones gives a sense of the ease they felt together, for the response of shock to the bawdiness of Tom Jones had not diminished since its publication. That two young people could discuss such a work suggests a willingness to go beyond flirtation into an area of sensuous exploration. She was keenly conscious of his being teased for his attentions to her, as she wrote to Cassandra, and she expected the drama to play itself out at the next ball—“I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.”
It did not happen. She was snatched from the good novel she had imagined herself into and placed into an alternate narrative of class bitterness. The real world that her heroine Elinor had recognized had intervened, the world of money and practical considerations, and the hero, it turned out, was part of a pragmatic design. For Jane Austen’s Tom Lefroy was gone, swiftly removed by the Lefroy family, who had greater plans for this young man than marriage to an un-moneyed clergyman’s daughter who would not be allowed, after all, to utter a lighthearted acceptance of marriage, undercut only by the condition of the white coat.
She never saw him again, although it is clear she thought of him. It is also apparent that the episode multiplied itself again and again in her novels, embedded in the theme of thwarted love and loss of nerve. In the novels, happily, there is often a second or third chance, a triumphant overriding of class difference, but between Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy there is only silence. He returned to Ireland after his studies, married an heiress, produced a large family, became something of a pious bore, and eventually rose to become chief justice of Ireland.
She responded to her heartbreak with typical self-mockery, turning herself for a brief time into the role of abandoned lover, overflowing tears and all. Friends rushed to comfort her, but the experience must have been genuinely humiliating, especially since she had broadcast her hopes to Cassandra. Had she foolishly magnified a relationship that was barely in its infancy—three or four balls and one visit to Steventon, some shared laughter and literary exchanges, and perhaps a kiss or two? Certainly she had misjudged the threat she posed to the Lefroy family.
The romantic impulse that had accompanied her since her early youth fell at least partly away. She was no longer a child passionate about the certainty of love overcoming all obstacles. She was an unmarried woman of twenty who, because of her lack of fortune, was going to have fewer and fewer choices. Like Elinor, like Marianne, her two new heroines, she was vulnerable to a society she was just beginning to understand.
She buried herself in gossip, in family doings, in a prolonged visit to her brother Edward’s family in Kent, but her greatest comfort may have come from her ebullient London cousin, Eliza. The two of them carried on a lively correspondence and saw each other as frequently as possible. Eliza, two years a widow, was a vivid presence, a woman of affairs who managed to keep the romantic flame alive in a pragmatic world. Already she was looking around and assessing her chances of forming new attachments, but she was in no hurry. Marriage could be a form of subjugation, she believed. There might be other possibilities for women of wit and intelligence.
6
TOM FOWLE WAS DEAD. The shocking news arrived at Steventon from the West Indies in the spring of 1797. Cassandra’s beloved fiancé had perished of yellow fever and been buried at sea. An Easter wedding had been planned and then postponed when Tom failed to return. The Austen family was in deep mourning. From all reports, Cassandra Austen’s behavior took the form of dignified stoicism, and even though she was in her early twenties she seems to have withdrawn almost at once into a life of quiet spinsterhood, or even a sort of symbolic widowhood. Prudent young Tom Fowle had taken the precaution of making a will before he set out, leaving Cassandra with a sum of £1,000. Close to being a widow’s inheritance, it was not enough to live on but enough to make her, for the rest of her life, somewhat less dependent on family funds. A young woman of vigor and humor—her sister Jane once called her “the finest comic writer of the present age”—she entered at age twenty-four a premature middle age, assuming some of her mother’s domestic burdens and transforming herself into a devoted maiden aunt. The two sisters clung together in their numb sorrow, or so it seemed to their friends, their lives more closely entwined than ever before. “They alone fully understood what each had suffered and felt and thought,” one family member recounted.
And yet, all around them life was going on. Cousin Eliza stepped into the inner circle of the Austen family with a dramatic double flourish. First she refused James Austen’s offer of marriage ( James’s wife, Anne, had died early in his marriage), and then, in 1797, she and Henry Austen, ten years her junior, were married. It was a marriage useful to both in practical terms and also, it appears, an affair of passion that lasted until Eliza’s death in 1813.
Inevitably Jane Austen was spun into her own family chronicle of grief and consolation. At the same time she was hard at work on a new novel she titled, provisionally, First Impressions, which was really about the faultiness of first impressions, or how an intelligent young woman named Elizabeth Bennet forms an entrenched negative opinion of an arrogant young man, Darcy, whom she believes has insulted herself and her family.
Jane Austen, unlike her sister, had not given up her own delight in balls and flirtations, though her hopes at this time seem to have been growing dimmer. The Lefroy family, perhaps to make amends for the Tom Lefroy debacle, attempted a piece of heavy matchmaking with a young clergyman, Samuel Blackall, but between Blackall and Jane there existed a cloud of mutual indifference. She sensed, humiliatingly, that she was not noticeably sought after at balls, writing to Cassandra, “I do not think I am very much in request—People are rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it . . .”
As First Impressions took shape, the Austen family, those eager aficionados of the novel, followed the fortunes of Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley, of Elizabeth and Darcy, as though they were real people, neighbors whose entanglements and betrayals touched each of them. Mr. Collins, perhaps the most fully comic of the Austen characters (and possibly modeled on Samuel Blackall), moved into Steventon with his obsequies and absurdities and lack of sense, providing welcome laughter in a bleak season.
It is sometimes thought that the Aust
en novels are dense and slow moving. The opposite is true, as her readers know. She mastered, early on, the ability to move scenes briskly along. Moments of perceived inaction contrast sharply with abrupt psychological shifts. Always there is the sense that she knows where she’s going, even in the midst of digression. This assured narrative voice anchors and sustains the human drama, and it is a particular pleasure for the reader to find important moments buried in paragraphs that pretend to be flattened asides.
First Impressions, much later renamed Pride and Prejudice, turned on the human capacity to judge—or to misjudge—the difference between appearance and reality. Was Darcy ever as disdainful and distant as Elizabeth believed, or did a girlish longing for drama—a drama in which she is the self-selected heroine—exaggerate her response to him and distort her initial impression? She certainly has doubts about her own judgment following Darcy’s first and unanticipated declaration of love. Immediately after, when she finds herself alone, she sits down and cries for half an hour. The crisp precision of that half-hour bawl is typically Elizabeth and typical of Jane Austen, too. A fifteen-minute howl would show lack of sensibility and a full hour, lack of sense. Weeping, in Elizabeth’s case, gives way to “agitated reflections,” and by the next morning she turns, sensibly, to the remedy of “air and exercise” and to a serious rethinking about Mr. Darcy’s motives.
Elizabeth Bennet is a brilliantly drawn and attractive character, and the novel is so subtly paced that even after repeated readings readers find themselves growing tense as the story progresses, preparing for disappointment, fearing that Elizabeth has gone too far this time, that she has, through pride, through rigidity of mind, lost the one person capable of rescuing her and giving her the life she deserves.
It is difficult to love Darcy, though readers are attracted to something glittering and hard in his personality. There is always a sense that he is behaving with a little too much dignity, that he is in some sense doing Elizabeth a favor by falling in love with her, acting against his best instincts and caving in to a fatal male weakness, sacrificing himself however nobly, and paying altogether too much attention to the shallow, spiteful Bingley sisters.
The “voice” of the novel is not delivered with the mature Austen measure, but is instead a cry of youthful anguish, the acknowledgment that one’s parents often present an acute embarrassment. The silly are allowed to lead the sensible into peril. And parents are capable of separating their children from their destinies, simply by being parents: blockish, awkward, old-fashioned, countrified, and coarse. In novel after novel the Austen pattern is replayed, the non-Darwinian emergence of brilliance from a dull dynasty: Elizabeth Bennet’s ravishing intelligence, Fanny Price’s perfect balance, Anne Elliot’s assurance and sense of self—all these women overthrow the throttled lives they are born into and the oafish parents who bring them into the world and then leave them adrift. There is a sense in which Jane Austen wrote not so much about marriage as about the tension between parents and children, the inevitable rupture between generations and the destruction that carelessness and inattention to these bonds can bring about. We are led inevitably back to the question of her own parents, and the glazed cleverness, and perhaps care, with which she covered the Austen biographical tracks.
Because her bright, splintery dialogue is so often interrupted by a sad, unanswerable tone of estranged sympathy, stirred by complacent acts of hypocrisy or injustice, the reader of Austen’s novels comes again and again to the reality of a ferocious and persistent moral anger. It is a manageable anger, and artfully concealed by the mechanism of an arch, incontrovertible amiability. Even her own family, her close circle of readers, may have missed the astringency of her observations.
Her own reading had comprised sentimental novels and novels of terror. These models must have disappointed her in some way, failing in their connection to the life she knew existed and proving incapable of illuminating the subtle shifts of feeling between people as they came to know each other. Probably she found the novels she read just a little absurd, and for a time she was able to rejoice in the humor and horror they provided. It was their exaggeration that made them absurd, but the real absurdity lay in their preoccupations, the strangeness of the human dilemmas on the page. What she wanted, and what she accomplished, was the dramatization of the familiar, the recognizable; and though Pride and Prejudice is closer to being a romance than any of her other novels, it takes as its subject the very issue that Jane Austen was struggling with at the age of twenty-one. Human beings required love and location, but society, with its sharp class separations, stood in the way of a woman’s fulfillment. The novel, in its subject, is both like and different from her own circumstances, and its ebullience convinces the reader of Austen’s own enjoyment of the mingled episodes of comedy and longing. Physicality and youth push the story toward its fairy-tale denouement. The young Bennet sisters are healthy, vital creatures, and the men—Bingley, Darcy, Wickham—burst with male strength and attractiveness.
Elizabeth looks for a time to have lost her chance at happiness. She has refused Mr. Collins and also Darcy, and has lost Wickham to her sister Lydia. Despite this, she remains surprisingly sanguine, convinced as she is of her essential worth. Her confrontation with Lady Catherine is one of the most vigorous and triumphant scenes in literature, for here she is allowed the full honesty we know her to possess. She is reckless; she is morally certain of her ground, and she understands despite her youth just what is at stake.
Mr. Austen, Jane’s father, was an inveterate reader of comic novels, and he clearly saw, even beyond a father’s natural fond inclination, that First Impressions was publishable. In November 1797 he picked up his pen and wrote to the publisher Thomas Cadell in London.
“I have in my possession a manuscript novel, comprised in three vols about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina. As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its first appearance under a respectable name, I apply to you. Shall be much obliged therefore if you will inform me whether you chuse to be concerned in it. What will be the expense of publishing at the author’s risk; & what will you venture to advance for the property of it, if on a perusal, it is approved of? Should your answer give me encouragement I will send you the work.”
Even knowing that Mr. Austen was not in the habit of writing such flogging letters, we marvel today at how restrained his words are when compared with today’s covering letter to a book publisher. He is concerned, it seems, mainly with the financing of the venture. He is utterly circumspect about the author, who she might be, what his relationship to her is. He says nothing at all about the subject of the novel, and not one word about the vibrancy of the writing. He does, on the other hand, and perhaps too openly, flatter the publisher with his “respectable name,” and he attempts to enhance the novel’s appeal by a sideways reference to Evelina. Here he very likely misjudged the effect; Fanny Burney’s novel had been published almost twenty years earlier and was written in a style that by the end of the eighteenth century was decidedly dated.
In any case, Mr. Austen’s letter of inquiry did not stir any interest at all at Thomas Cadell’s office. Someone wrote across the top of the page: “declined by return of post.”
We have no way of knowing how this rejection was received at Steventon. Mr. Austen, who seems not to have pursued the matter with other publishers, was undoubtedly disappointed that he was not to have some relief from a steadily dwindling income. He was no longer taking pupils, his farm income was unreliable, and it appeared more and more likely that his two daughters were not going to make brilliantly advantageous marriages or, in fact, any kind of marriage at all.
Did Jane Austen know that her father had approached a publisher, and if so, was she crushed by the publisher’s lack of interest? We know only that she turned her energies, and perhaps her disappointment, toward a revision of her earlier work, Elinor and Marianne, which she had renamed Sense and Sensibility. She was entering a period of growing co
nfidence in her abilities, and this new assurance must have defended her against the casual dismissal, the cruelty of the phrase “declined by return of post.” Her reworking of earlier texts suggests a new ease with the form and direction of her work—which was immediate and as close to her as her needlework and her daily engagement with the pianoforte. The world of London publishers, on the other hand, was distant, and chances of publication remote. Meanwhile, she had her small audience: her family, a few friends. And she had, it would seem, a gathering of faith in her own work. She must have known, as the old century was drawing to a close, exactly how good a writer she really was.
7
ALL HER LIFE Jane Austen inhabited the world of the lesser gentility with its necessary thrift. Her letters, and her novels too, show a very real concern with the cost of articles. She knew the monetary value of a yard of good wool cloth or a basket of apples. There were always servants in the Austen household, but they were few in number, and the Austen women themselves augmented their efforts, supervising meals, ordering supplies, mending and remaking garments, and sewing the shirts that the men of the family wore. Many of their neighbors lived in far grander circumstances, but the Austen family, with their church and family connections, were respected and made welcome. They were recommended, also, by the fact that they were better educated than many they came face to face with, so that their wit, their liveliness, and their conversation leveled some of the barriers that lack of wealth might place in the way.
It was through her brother Edward that Jane Austen was exposed to the very different realm of great wealth and ease. Edward’s adoption by the Knight family had cast him into the role of landed gentleman, and as a young woman Jane made many visits to Kent, where Edward and his family lived, first at the relatively modest house Rowling, and later at the great family seat of Godmersham. The eighteenth-century dwelling, still standing today, is set in the midst of a private landscaped park. Its marble-floored foyer is beautifully proportioned, and gives way to large, airy reception rooms, including a library where Jane Austen once found herself alone during a visit, musing on the presence of twenty-eight chairs, five tables, and two fires. Her gleeful counting of those twenty-eight chairs tells us something about how she regarded such wealth—as utterly delightful, something to be enjoyed and luxuriated in, and also more than a little bit foolish.
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