Jane Austen

by Carol Shields

  It would be almost ten years, when she was approaching her thirty-fifth birthday, before she returned to the productive working habits of her young womanhood. It is impossible to say whether she suffered from depression or distraction. She had been dislocated in both time and space, taken abruptly to a new and fashionable world, and it was not one she would have chosen.

  It might be thought that a move would stimulate a young writer. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, setting down the Austen memoir years later, seems to have been no more than mildly perplexed by his aunt’s midlife silence, saying only that it “might rather have been expected that fresh scenes and new acquaintance would have called forth her powers.” Virginia Woolf has written insightfully on this very topic. A writer, she maintains, does not need stimulation, but the opposite of stimulation. A writer needs regularity, the same books around her, the same walls. A writer needs self-ordered patterns of time, her own desk, and day after profitable day in order to do her best work.

  Jane Austen and her family moved house several times during their Bath years, and from what we know these rooms grew progressively smaller and less comfortable. She also suffered a number of deaths during the period: the gradual collapse and death of her cousin Eliza’s fifteen-year-old son; the accidental death of her great friend Mrs. Lefroy; and, above all, the demise of her father in 1805. Austen has a reputation for being philosophical about death and for dry detachment and acceptance of its reality. The letter she writes to her brother Francis informing him of their father’s death seems exceptionally cool, and a reader of Jane Austen is soon aware of how seldom tragic death intrudes on the pages of her fiction. But death, and particularly the death of her father, must have affected her deeply. He had fostered her talent, providing her with a careful critical eye and with the more practical gifts of writing paper and a writing desk.

  His death also placed his wife and daughters in a precarious economic state. There were no pensions for the widows and children of clergymen. Mrs. Austen and Cassandra were each left with a small income, but Jane Austen had nothing. Early on she must have perceived the way in which reality rebukes fiction since her heroines, with their intelligence and vigor, are always able to grasp some means of self-preservation while she, their creator, is left helpless—with no income and no choices.

  Her brothers Frank, James, and Henry all offered what they could to the three women, which was not a great deal. But Edward, the wealthy owner of Godmersham, and of huge landholdings in Kent and Hampshire, seems to have taken a rather nonchalant part in providing for his mother and sisters. It was only years later that he wakened to their circumstances, pushed a button, and provided them with a permanent home at Chawton—where Jane Austen, once again, became a functioning writer.

  13

  THE CREATIVE SILENCE of Jane Austen’s middle years gestures toward other silences. Of George, her handicapped brother placed in foster care when he was a child, there is not one word, though he lived into old age.

  Of her mother’s uncertain health and difficult disposition there are only covert suggestions. With the Reverend George Austen’s death, the relationships in the little family must have shifted, the newly impoverished mother and two daughters rubbing up against each other in new, more immediate ways, and probably with greater distress.

  What other events intrude on this long midlife silence? A sort of half story exists about Jane visiting a Devon resort and becoming friendly with a young man who showed an interest in continuing the friendship, and then died. This small chip of an incident, if it did occur, was related by Cassandra to her niece Caroline years later and is, sadly, unreliable in its turnings, being too much a mirror image of Cassandra’s tragic engagement and too much the traditional material of opaque family legends, which represent, perhaps, the wish to sprinkle a little fairy dust on a life that was sadly lacking in romance.

  Rumors and legends also attend a marriage proposal that Jane Austen received—and accepted—in early December of 1802. She and Cassandra were away from Bath, visiting at a large country house near Steventon. The Bigg-Wither family of Manydown Park were very old friends, and their two sons and seven daughters had intermingled freely with the Austen children as they grew to adulthood. Catherine and Alethea Bigg, in particular, were close to Cassandra and Jane, and possessed the same high spirits.

  Harris Bigg-Wither, since the death of his older brother, was the heir to Manydown Park, a rather shy and shambling young man of twenty-one, with a serious stutter and an oddly blunted intelligence. To everyone’s astonishment, he approached Jane Austen during her December visit and asked her to be his wife. She accepted, then almost immediately regretted her decision.

  The age difference between them was only six years, not a serious point of consideration, though it is quite clear that she did not love him. The heroes of all her novels are bookish men—Henry Tilney, Darcy, Mr. Knightley—and Harris Bigg-Wither was an overgrown country schoolboy with very little inclination for learning. She did, to be sure, long to marry. She was just days away from her twenty-seventh birthday and facing the reality of what that might mean. Age twenty-seven had a meaningful ring to it. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility proclaims, “A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.” Austen’s own words written a few years earlier must have rattled in her head, and she would already have been unsettled by a surprise offer from an old family friend and one she had never thought of in a romantic light.

  It is certain that being the mistress of the great estate of Manydown would have been a temptation to Jane Austen, growing older and living in rented rooms with her parents in Bath. Undoubtedly, she was fond of the boyish, awkward Harris, whom she had known all her life, but the intimacy of marriage was a different matter.

  She had expressed her thoughts about marriage as a “compact of convenience,” in which each partner benefits in some way. Charlotte Lucas, accepting the egregious Mr. Collins as a husband, explains: “I am not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home.” Jane Austen also longed for a home; all her novels concern themselves with this longing. But the reality, when represented in the bumptious form of Harris Bigg-Wither himself, was untenable.

  During the night following the proposal she resolved to break her agreement. Almost certainly she consulted Cassandra. The marriage would bind the two families even closer together and would give Jane a home of her own, but nothing could alter the person of Harris Bigg-Wither and the very probable revulsion she felt for him. Emma in The Watsons announces that she can think of nothing worse “than [to] marry a man I did not like.” And years later, advising her niece Fanny, who was in the delicate position of having encouraged a young man in his hopes, Austen wrote, “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

  She knew, too, and so did Cassandra, that marriage would permanently reshape their extraordinarily close sisterly relationship. In accepting the marriage proposal, she must have felt she had made a dutiful decision, one that would ease the worry and financial strain of the Austen family. But the role of martyr was too heavy to bear. The morning after the proposal she confronted her fiancé and informed him of her change of mind.

  The situation was immensely uncomfortable on all sides. Jane and Cassandra left the house immediately and fled to Steventon, where they demanded that their brother James take them home to Bath the next day. They were in a state of great distress, insisting that they must leave the neighborhood at once. The scene is dramatic and unforgettable: the tableau of the trembling women who, during what must have been a sleepless night, came to a decision that might possibly rupture relations between two old families. Jane Austen was exposed as a woman who for once lacked good sense, first leaping into a serious agreement without adequate reflection, then embarrassing herself and the members of two households. Cassandra, fleeing with Jane and sharing her humiliation, can be seen as the persuasive force behind the change of plan. Her own concerns, her wish to protec
t or limit her sister’s future, are caught up in the net of intrigue.

  The story of the marriage proposal, its hasty acceptance and its reversal twelve hours later, entered the leaves of the Austen legend. Each family member had a theory, an explanation, about why Jane, normally so determined in her resolutions, so sensible, should have entered into a hasty agreement and then, with great clumsiness, extricated herself. What a pity, some of them must have said. Her life would have been more comfortable, more rewarding, and there might even have been children. An averted catastrophe, others must have said; for Jane Austen was not Charlotte Lucas. She was not a woman who could marry without love and without even a measure of respect.

  His heart intact, or so it would seem, Harris Bigg-Wither proceeded to marry Anne Howe Frith two years later and produce a family of ten children. Jane Austen, having survived this excruciating experience in 1802, returned to Bath and to a future in which her chances of marriage declined with each birthday. She must have meditated on her stupidity and grieved from time to time about a life she had rejected. In her letters she grows increasingly silent on the subject of balls and parties, and of the possibility that she might yet meet her ideal husband.

  There was an injurious silence, too, from the London publisher Crosby about the publication of Northanger Abbey, or Susan, as it was then called, which had first been accepted—and its publication advertised—in 1803. The silence on the part of the publisher went on and on, year after year without explanation. Why didn’t she contact them and demand an explanation? She must have been, like any beginning novelist, unsure of the power arrangements between author and publisher. Certainly she wasn’t accustomed to dealing with publishers; publishers existed in another realm of life—in London, with their own habits and expectations, and their own majestic decisions.

  She had already, with First Impressions, been cruelly cut down; now, at least, with the help of her brother Henry and his connections, she had obtained a promise of publication, and one she was disinclined to stir by annoying letters of inquiry. And undoubtedly she expected to hear at any moment that the novel was in print, that she was, at last, a published author, perhaps even a highly praised new voice. Meanwhile, it was difficult to invest her energies in a serious new work when not one of her finished novels had been launched in the world.

  Novelists do not write into a void. They require an answering response, an audience of readers outside their family circle, and they also need the approval that professional publication brings. Next week, next year—surely she would hear soon. This hope must have remained with her, but the impulse to produce more novels withered.

  A series of discouragements conspired against her in the middle of her life, and the resulting silence means that everything we know of her during this period is a guessing game, a question that leads around and around to an even greater silence.

  14

  THE LONG YEARS of silence had to be filled somehow. Jane Austen, restless and dissatisfied with life in Bath, busied herself with long hikes—she once described herself as “a desperate walker”—and with visits to Lyme Regis and other holiday resorts.

  And in 1803 she began a new novel, The Watsons, which she never finished. We are left with about 17,000 words of promising dramatic action, perhaps one quarter of a finished novel, and then an abrupt halt in 1805, probably at the time of her father’s death—just as she was about to dramatize the death of Mr. Watson in the novel and leave Emma Watson an orphan.

  Jane Austen was not, on the whole, an autobiographical novelist, but this fragment, The Watsons, presses closer to her own life and predicament than any of her other works. The four Watson daughters are unmarried, and they are poor. Their father is a clergyman and in poor health. With his impending death, their situation is about to worsen rather than improve—unless, that is, they can find husbands. Emma Watson, who in her vivacity and intelligence resembles Elizabeth Bennet, has been raised not within the family, but by a more cultivated aunt, somewhat in the same manner as Edward Austen, who was plucked out of the respectable but struggling family at Steventon and adopted by wealthy relations.

  Even closer to the autobiographical bone may be the question of intense sibling rivalry between the Watsons—treachery, in fact, between two of the sisters. The altercation is shocking, and there has been speculation that a degree of difficulty existed between Jane and Cassandra Austen, who have commonly been regarded as being devoted to each other. But signs are apparent, and not just in The Watsons, that there was some strain between them. In their later years they were frequently separated, alternating their visits to relations, and these arrangements may have been deliberately put in place by a family that recognized the situation.

  Jane, the younger sister, the writer of great novels, always, superficially at least, deferred to Cassandra, so much so that some of her letters to her older sister have a suggestion of appeasement, the wish to amuse at any cost and the refusal to take herself seriously as a correspondent.

  Sisterly relationships are presented with great warmth in the early novels, but they cool noticeably in Mansfield Park, where the Bertram sisters are on poor terms, and in Persuasion, where Anne ardently dislikes her silly, snobbish sisters and makes no apology for her feelings. As for Emma Woodhouse and her sister Isabella, they are widely separated by age and geography so that they scarcely seem sisters at all.

  There is no hard evidence that Cassandra betrayed her sister in any way, although she must have played an advisory role in the broken engagement with Bigg-Wither, something that Jane Austen couldn’t help adding to her stock of experience and that she may have carried forward, consciously or unconsciously, into the fabric of The Watsons.

  As the novel opens, Emma has returned to her family and, like her sisters, is assumed to be in the serious business of husband hunting. Local society conspires with this drive, and the story takes off quickly in the direction of matchmaking. A number of available males are introduced, and Emma, again like Elizabeth, appoints herself the gentle judge of her suitors’ various moral achievements and failures.

  The writing is often charming, with an openness of expression that signals a new determination to describe the plight of women, particularly the fact that women of Jane Austen’s class had nothing but marriage to rescue them from their parental home. A marriage of love was almost always out of reach in real life, though all of Jane Austen’s heroines, before and following The Watsons, achieve just that. The reality was that women without money were forced into marriages of compromise, which was what Jane Austen herself had recently rejected when she withdrew her promise to Harris Bigg-Wither. A number of misgivings must have followed that decision, since the alternative was spinsterhood, with its various shames and confinements.

  Jane Austen was a writer who kept her manuscripts close at hand and who tinkered with them endlessly. Other writers burn or shred their unfinished efforts, but she had enough regard for her tentative drafts to keep them safe. The fragmentary story of the Watsons has survived and come down to a contemporary readership that appreciates its energy and promise and, most particularly, the light it shines on Jane Austen’s thoughts in the early years of the century while she was living in Bath with her parents, after having escaped marriage by a whisker.

  She discussed the proposed trajectory of The Watsons with Cassandra, who passed on the novel’s narrative structure much later in life. There was to be a happy ending, which would surprise no one. Emma Watson would reject the attentions of Lord Osborne, who would have brought security and comfort to the whole Watson family, and marry a man of simplicity and sincerity, capable of offering the gift of love. The makings of a fairy tale are here: the poor but noble-spirited young woman—Emma Watson—who refuses to cave in to an unjust social norm. To pursue a man in order to improve one’s situation, she tells her sister Elizabeth, “is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education & feeling it ought not be, it cannot be the greatest.” Eli
zabeth, an older, more experienced sister, is less sanguine. For her there is little to look forward to.

  Why did Jane Austen abandon the project? She had invented an attractive heroine and placed her in a promising moral and social dilemma. She had established a firm narrative arc, and there is very little to support the idea that she might have turned the tables on her readers, investing Lord Osborne with an unsuspected worth.

  A dazzling episode occurs in the opening pages of the novel. Emma attends a neighborhood ball, and instead of the familiar scene of the girl without a partner, we see a young boy, abandoned and longing to dance. Emma acts forcefully by rescuing him from his lonely humiliation: “ ‘I shall be very happy to dance with you sir, if you like it’ said she, holding out her hand with the most unaffected good humour.” She takes him as her dancing partner, spontaneously and joyfully, and with natural respect. She might have been thought silly or aggressive, but instead she is perceived by those at the ball to have acted with great tact and natural kindness.

  There is not a great deal of love for children in Jane Austen’s work, which is not surprising since she was often saddled with the care of her many nieces and nephews. But this scene from The Watsons draws on the early and more innocent response she had to the vulnerability of children—and to the pleasure of dancing.

  The scene is a joyous set piece, a chance for the reader to know and appreciate Emma’s rare qualities. Soon after, though, the story of Emma and her sisters hardens. The desperate struggle to marry becomes a bitter impasse. Elizabeth, Emma’s older sister, puts it plainly: “You know we must marry—I could do very well single for my own part.—A little company, and a pleasant ball now and then, would be enough for me, if one could be young forever, but my father cannot provide for us, and it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at.”