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THE FINAL YEARS at Steventon were the waiting years, the in-between years. Mrs. Austen suffered periodic illness, which required attendance. Her daughter Jane had the “dignity,” as she put it rather caustically, of administering laudanum to her. Jane and Cassandra Austen, by now the ever available spinster sisters, were often called upon to give assistance in the homes of their relations; they alternated their visits to Godmersham, although it seems that Cassandra, who had by this time refined and perfected the role of aunt—and whose intelligence was less challenging to Edward’s wife—was the preferred visitor. The periods of enforced separation yielded an exchange of letters between the two sisters that comments on their ongoing life and offers material for speculation on the nature of their relationship. The text of these letters spills with extravagant compliments, interrupted by little scolds and reproofs. “I expected to have heard from you this morning, but no letter is come,” one of the scolds goes, from Jane to Cassandra. What was the tone of such recriminations? Was it the vagaries of the post that caused the consternation or Cassandra’s inability to match her sister’s letter-writing zeal?
When Jane Austen wrote to inform her sister of the birth of their brother James’s new son, Cassandra returned her good wishes directly to James and his second wife, Mary. Jane Austen, who had provided the news in the first place, was not thanked, and she was not pleased at being overlooked. She wrote to Cassandra in a jocular but petulant voice: “I shall not take the trouble of announcing to you any more of Mary’s Children, if, instead of thanking me for the intelligence, you always sit down and write to James.” And then she added: “I am sure nobody can desire your letters as I do, and I don’t think anyone deserves them so well.” This same letter contains a poisonously chilly remark about a neighbor, which is perhaps inserted in a humorous effort to lift the cloud of blame that preceded it: “Mrs. Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”
We don’t know what Cassandra made of such comments, and perhaps she made nothing—the reference may tap into an old joke of theirs and nothing more. Nor do we know how she received Jane Austen’s remarks about her sister-in-law Mary following childbirth. Mary was indelicate, Jane reported crossly. She was untidy in her arrangements. She “does not manage things in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself.”
Such remarks are telling, contributing to a sense of uneasiness between the sisters and to the suggestion, often raised, that Jane Austen avoided marriage because of the imposition and indignity of childbirth—and the very real danger of death. Certainly she was surrounded by terrifying examples; even her brother Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, died eventually in the lottery of childbirth.
And yet, Jane Austen had not given up the hope that she might meet a husband, and she continued to attend local balls and parties. But when she reported to Cassandra in 1799 that “There was the same kind of supper as last Year & the same want of chairs,” the drag of repetition and of failure is fully felt. And when we read in the same letter that “There was one Gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good looking young Man, who I was told wanted very much to be introduced to me;—but he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it,” we comprehend the undertow of discouragement and a reluctant acquiescence that doesn’t quite manage to disguise itself.
In 1798 she spent time in Bath with her uncle Leigh-Perrot and his wife, and it was probably after this adventure that she settled down to a new work of fiction, an early version of Northanger Abbey, with the provisional title of Susan, the most explicitly literary of her novels. It is a narrative about a young girl’s growing up, about living with authenticity, but it is also a novel-maker’s comment on the art of the novel, as seen through the lens of the popular Gothic romances of her time.
Jane Austen’s letters are filled with gossip, with visits, with shopping. Only occasionally does she talk about the act of writing itself, as in her well-known remark about how she worked on her small pieces of ivory or how she required only a few families to create the canvas for a novel. She wrote no essays about the novel form, and probably she read none. The novel was, during her lifetime, still in its infancy; its constructs, its subject matter, its self-consciousness were still being worked out. She read widely—good novels and rubbish—and evolved, slowly, her own notions of how the fictional world might reflect and interrogate the real world. In Northanger Abbey she mocks the silly Gothic novel and also the readers of such novels. She manages this with very little overt didacticism, allowing Catherine Morland to instruct us by her example while this young woman, the youngest of Austen’s heroines, grows toward a new self-understanding in which the imagination is tempered by reason. From having no place of her own—she is one of ten children and not particularly beautiful or intelligent—she finds where she belongs through the exercise of her own powers, particularly the power of love. Loving Henry makes Henry notice Catherine and eventually love her.
Catherine Morland is lively and impressionable, and she has read enough Gothic romances to distort her vision of the world. Northanger Abbey mixes genres; it is a burlesque of the Gothic, just slightly reminiscent of Jane Austen’s girlhood writing, and it is also the story of a young woman’s education. The witty and attractive Henry Tilney, with whom Catherine falls in love, is one of Austen’s most engaging creations. Like Darcy, he has the humanity to fall in love with a woman (girl?) who is inferior to him socially. He possesses the qualities of irony and integrity, and though he is a clergyman, he is utterly innocent of piety. Northanger Abbey is perhaps the only Jane Austen novel in which the heroine is in danger of being eclipsed by the hero. His sophistication counters Catherine’s lack of worldliness, questions her absence of self-consciousness, and he loves her, tentatively at first, then endearingly, for what she has not yet become—and may never fully become.
Northanger Abbey is satire; epigrams lie everywhere on its surface: “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.” The tone here is arch and literary, as it is in the many personal asides and authorly intrusions, but we can see and hear the irony of the author’s voice, an author who means exactly the opposite of what she is saying.
And yet, surprisingly, we can sometimes hear what sounds very much like a cry from the heart of the author herself. Describing Catherine, she says, “She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility; without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration, but what was very moderate and very transient.” Catherine finds her man in the person of Henry Tilney, the first man she dances with at Bath, but not before experiencing the poignant sense of aloneness that Jane Austen must have known. This revelation of loneliness is all the more surprising since it appears in the novel that, of all Austen’s work, most feels written as an entertainment.
The novel totters between this painful introspection and exclamations of assurance. Austen delivers, in chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey, a bold, spirited defense of the novel as a form, stepping off the page with a rare first person singular “I,” cutting away from the frame of the novel for a moment and mocking those who say pretentiously, “I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels.” In novels, the narrator argues, “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which, the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Extraordinarily, this manifesto was delivered by a woman in her early twenties, whose own works had yet to be published—and wouldn’t be for another dozen years.
The history of the Northanger Abbey manuscript is heart-breaking. It was completed in 1799 and read (and discussed and debated and weighed) by the Austen circle. Then it was put away for some years. In 1803, Jane Austen took it ou
t from whatever drawer or closet it had been secreted in and revised it. What might the intervening years have added to the original idea of a young, impressionable girl confronting her future and facing the real world she was about to enter? It is commonly believed that Jane Austen’s 1803 revisions were lighter and less extensive than those she imposed on her other novels. Still carrying the title Susan, the novel was sold to the London publisher Crosby for ten pounds. Austen must have been elated; she was twenty-eight years old, and this was her third mature novel—with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice still unpublished. At last she would find an audience.
In fact, the publisher did not bring out the novel as promised. Several years passed, and Jane Austen was never to know why a publisher would pay for a manuscript, advertise it, and then postpone its publication. Possibly the idea of the Gothic had lost its popularity, making a burlesque of the form somewhat absurd. Crosby may have lost confidence in a book that, in fact, is somewhat unsteady in its structure and certainty unorthodox. It has to be said that its elements—a young girl’s struggle for love and happiness and a commentary on a fashionable literary strand, the Gothic—are not particularly well integrated. In 1809 the publisher offered her back her manuscript for the same ten pounds she had been paid, but she was unwilling or unable to take up the offer. Finally, in 1816, after the success of Emma, she did buy it back, revising it lightly and writing an “Advertisement” which describes the original publisher’s delay and begs the patience of the reader, who might find a number of out-of-date allusions. It was finally published along with Persuasion in 1818, a year after Jane Austen’s death, in a four-volume offering “By the Author of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Mansfield-Park,’ &c.”
An unsigned “Biographical Notice of the Author” prefaced the text, a brief sketch written, in fact, by Henry Austen, Jane’s devoted brother. Jane Austen was, at last, introduced to the world. Henry is lavish in his praise of her person, her skill with music, drawing, and dancing, her devout Christianity, her taste and tact. He mentions Jane’s debt to their father and how unsurprising it is that, considering her parentage, she “should, at a very early age, have become sensible to the charms of style, and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language. . . . Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget.”
In this hymn of praise we can hear the voice of an adoring and grieving brother. But he was wrong when he claimed that everything flowed finished from his sister’s pen; she was a fervent reviser of her own work, willing—as with Sense and Sensibility—to alter her basic novelistic structures. She happily rejiggered her point of view and, in the case of Persuasion, her ending.
And in one of his judgments brother Henry was far too moderate. Jane Austen’s works, he prophesied, would eventually be “placed on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth.” How far from the mark he was. Not only would she outdistance those all-but-forgotten names, but she would also find herself comfortably on the same shelf and in the good and steady company of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
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THE NEXT NINE YEARS of Jane Austen’s life were unsettled and, to those who interest themselves in her creative arc, almost entirely silent. This long silence, in the middle of a relatively short life, is bewildering. It is a silence that drives a wedge between her first three major novels and her final three: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. The silence asks questions about the flow of Jane Austen’s creative energies and about her reconciliation to the life she had been handed. She lived in a day when to be married was the only form of independence—and even then it was very much a restricted liberty. A married woman could achieve a home of her own, and with it a limited sphere of sovereignty. Why would Charlotte Lucas of Pride and Prejudice marry such a fool as Mr. Collins, who had already been turned down by Elizabeth Bennet? Because, in her late twenties, this was Charlotte’s last—perhaps only—chance to escape the dominion of her parents and establish her own home. A home of one’s own—we find this phrase, or a parallel expression, everywhere in Austen’s work. Unlike Elizabeth Bennet, Charlotte Lucas would have suppressed her physical antipathy for conjugal life with Mr. Collins and, once assured of an heir and a spare, be able to construct a relatively separate existence—a marriage of compromise, of good sense and practicality.
What other possibilities were there? Within Jane Austen’s immediate view there were no women artists, writers, or performers. Women of intellectual accomplishment were rare. What, besides marriage, might intervene? Her neighbor Mrs. Lefroy was intelligent and well read, but she was a wife and the mistress of a household. The witty, accomplished cousin Eliza provided, briefly, an example of an independent woman of unorthodox opinions, but even Eliza rather quickly formed a second marriage and surrendered her notions of independence.
Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three, the rhythms of Jane Austen’s life—and the rhythms of her writing, too—were profoundly disturbed. She had been born in rural Steventon, and in her midtwenties was living there still, under the family roof, within the confines of her father’s income and will. Early schooling and occasional travels—London, Kent, Bath—had taken her away from home for short periods, but home was what she loved best, home in its real sense—those comfortable and familiar Steventon surroundings. Home also meant psychological security—daily routines, old friends, acceptance, usefulness to those she loved, and the series of small accomplishments that gave purpose to her existence. Her sense of irony often throws biographers off course when assessing the Austen personality, but of two or three things we can be sure: She loved the natural world and drew strength from it. She thrived in circumstances that were steady and assured. Her creativity, her ability to put pen to paper, flowed from the reality of the familiar, the predictable.
Her attachment to nature and to the calm of Hampshire was genuine, and each temporary uprooting had brought, at its conclusion, renewal and the recaptured appreciation of the deep value she placed on home, the one place where she had a measure of autonomy and encouragement and where she felt at ease with her creative self.
In the year 1800 an enormous upheaval occurred in Jane Austen’s settled life. The story is muddled and riddled with inconsistencies, probably because the most complete account of it was written many years after the actual event—almost seventy years, in fact, by Austen’s niece Caroline. “My aunts had been away [from Steventon] a little while, and were met in the hall on their return [in fact, only Jane was present] by their mother who told them it was all settled, and they were going to live in Bath. My mother who was present said my aunt [ Jane] was greatly distressed.” There is no mention of fainting in this account, but the traditional tale is that Jane Austen fainted on hearing the news that the family was to leave its beloved Steventon and move to a place that was different in tone, feeling, and familiarity.
Can she really have fainted, she who in her earliest work mocked extravagant emotional responses, especially those assigned to women? The story accords well with her recently finished novel, Susan, but it is not securely embedded in eye-witness reports. She would have been shocked; there can be no doubt of that. The move to Bath came as a surprise to all the Austen family, though it is hard to believe that the possibility of such a move had not been previously discussed and debated. What were the old folks to do with themselves in their later years?
Every family has to deal with such questions. George Austen was seventy, a rather remarkable age to achieve in such a time; his wife was in up-and-down health, but her ups declared her to be still a woman of force and a full partner in a marriage that had always been an authentic partnership. The two of them lived in an isolated rural neighborhood. Their children had scattered, and even the two spinster daughters who lived at home were away at the time the parents concocted the Bath plan. What might this empty-house period of childlessness have given them? Possibly each was directed toward an honesty of appro
ach; perhaps each of them spoke clearly. But could they have dismissed their daughters’ wishes at that moment? There must have been ample time over the years for parents and children—the mother and father and their daughters—to sit around a breakfast table and discuss the future. What might they do in their old age to alleviate and alter their current arrangements, which could not possibly go on in the old, comfortable, and familiar way? Two spinster daughters still lived at home—the perplexing daughter Cassandra, who had survived, but barely, the death of her beloved fiancé, and Jane, the literary daughter, the writer of novels, the ironic, spiky daughter who was sometimes misunderstood.
The family, the scattered sons and the daughters, must have made their feelings known about the obvious possibilities in letters or in the rare opportunities when they came together. Steventon was their home; they were all attached to what Steventon meant, its compacted memories and embodiment of family happiness. At the same time, they must all have looked forward in time and wondered what sort of decision their parents would make. Negotiations would have been delicate; age carried power in families, particularly when the elderly were, like the senior Austens, in full possession of their senses. What the elders decided must be respected. Children, especially dependent children, had little choice but to go along with their parents’ choices.
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