This subject, the impossible bargaining position of single women, becomes too quickly the only subject. The novel dwindles, narrows, and loses sparkle. The men are never brought fully to life. And perhaps this realization encouraged Austen to put the manuscript away.
The subject may have been too close to her own recent experience to permit the grace and humor and saving side stories of Pride and Prejudice. For a writer who had taken pains to avoid autobiography, the developments in the Watson family were becoming overly delicate to handle. And she must have been aware that she was covering the same territory as in her earlier novels, but with less buoyancy, bringing instead a harsh cry of rebellion and outrage.
Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, known by his aunt as Edward, offered an interesting conjecture about Jane’s failure to finish the novel. She might have placed the four Watson sisters at too low a level of society, he believed, and “like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain.” It is true that the Watsons are less fashionable and less financially secure than Austen’s other families, but they are not nearly as low on the social index as Fanny Price’s awful Portsmouth family in Mansfield Park; they are less desperate for respectability than the Bateses in Emma, less beleaguered than Mrs. Smith in Persuasion.
It is also true that Edward Austen-Leigh felt a custodial duty toward the Austen clan, wanting always to present the family in a respectable position. Low life frightened him, possibly, in a way that it did not frighten his aunt. Furthermore, the social balance in England had taken on immense freight between Jane Austen’s death in 1817 and the publication of Edward Austen-Leigh’s history at the height of the Victorian age, 1870. Nuances of politesse had multiplied. Certain social barometers had shifted. Ladies no longer helped with meals or with the washing of teacups. They had abandoned the spinning of fibers for the family linen. The wearing of pattens, crude, almost medieval shoes, was taken for granted by the practical Austen family, just the thing for muddy roads, but was seen by Jane Austen’s nephew as a sign of vulgarity. His history of his aunt and her family is full of such tensions. There is so much he cannot understand or refuses to understand, and so much family material for which he would like to offer up apology. The document is endearing for just this confusion of perceptions and for the light it casts on a shift of morals and manners in nineteenth-century England. We cannot read it today as precise truth, but we can appreciate its desire to map the life of his celebrated aunt in the light of his own time. The intensity of personal detail is a gift. As a young man he attempted to write a novel, and the memoir does move forward with a pleasing novelistic pace. Many of his conjectures are imaginative. Others are gross reductions: “Of events her life was singularly barren; few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.”
Jane Austen is sometimes thought of as being confined by her extremely narrow social view, but her work reveals a far wider optic lens. The Watson family was old-fashioned; they were frugal; they were necessarily engaged in the ongoing domestic labor of their home, their laundry, their small economies.
It is telling that The Watsons is the only major work by Austen that was written in Bath, that alien territory. Her early work was composed at her girlhood home in Steventon, and the later novels—Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion— in the settled tranquillity of Chawton. This single effort was brought to life—or at any rate to a stillbirth—in a city that she found uncongenial and at a time in her life when her self-confidence was at its lowest ebb.
15
THE ABILITY to sustain long works of fiction is at least partially dependent on establishing a delicate balance between solitude and interaction. Too much human noise during the writing of a novel distracts from the cleanliness of its over-arching plan. Too little social interruption, on the other hand, distorts a writer’s sense of reality and allows feeling to “prey” on the consciousness—to place Jane Austen’s (or Anne Elliot’s) own words in a slightly different context.
For every writer the degree of required social involvement or distance must be differently gauged, but novelists who take refuge in isolated log cabins tend to be a romantic minority, or perhaps even a myth. Most novelists, knowing that ongoing work is fed by ongoing life, prize their telephones, their correspondence, and their daily rubbing up against family and friends.
Jane Austen, who wrote intensely social novels, was an intensely social being. “We did not walk long in the Crescent yesterday,” she wrote Cassandra; “it was hot and not crouded [sic] enough.” Moments of solitary meditation are relatively rare in her work. Changes of mood or intention are most often framed within conversations—during supper parties, while taking long walks, or mending linen in the sitting room. Two, three, four people are present; their participation is the mechanism that moves the action forward. Whatever is proposed or considered finds a response, either a concert of agreement or a choir of dissonance. There may be a knock on the door at any moment or a carriage passing on the roadway, and these developments must be registered. Individual actions have social consequences in Jane Austen’s fiction, and the same can be assumed for her life. She admired—as Mr. Knightley in Emma admired—an open temper, but recognized that what was deeply private was likely to remain unspoken and unwritten, except in the form of gesture; and for this she possessed an unequivocal skill. Her novels can be read through their moments of confrontation and also through the light that glances and gathers around the many silences.
For most of her life Jane Austen had little opportunity to indulge in solitude. She herself was almost never beyond the reach of family, or out of touch with friends. An empty room in the early years at Steventon would have been a rarity; the various small rented quarters in Bath must also have prohibited the privacy a writer cherishes. Later, life at Chawton presented similar problems: four women (for Martha Lloyd had joined the family by then) inhabiting a few crowded rooms, together with the comings and goings of servants and the arrival, most often unannounced, of visitors.
To write is to be self-conscious, as Jane Austen certainly knew. What flows onto paper is more daring or more covert than a writer’s own voice, or more exaggerated or effaced. This gap between consciousness and text is always ready to freeze the movement of the pen, particularly when the act of writing is done in the presence of others. Austen had no study of her own, no cozy refuge arranged for her quiet convenience. The encouragement of her imagination did not arise from conditions offered her by others. Composing—and this is the term she generally used—was done in the family sitting room, and it is said, famously, that she quickly covered over the manuscript page when someone else entered unexpectedly, or slipped the pages inside her small mahogany desk.
As a woman of her class, it was expected that she would be accompanied on outings. Leaving her childhood friends behind, she managed to find new companions at Bath who were willing to share her long walks. They may not always have been agreeable company, but they were convenient for her purpose. Her travels in England—and she never visited more than a handful of counties—were undertaken with a family member by her side: her mother, her sister, one of her many brothers, or else a trusted family servant.
She may have chafed at her lack of solitude, but a life of social engagement was what she knew and what in the end nourished her fiction. Friendship was one of the values of the eighteenth century into which she was born. It was sometimes spoken of as though it were a new invention. Her own family depended on their neighbors’ warm hospitality, and many of these friendships endured throughout her life.
There is even a sense that she was able to extract more pleasure from her social encounters than others did and that she prided herself on that ability. A last-minute invitation to dine at Ashe Park was immediately accepted. “We had a very quiet evening,” she wrote Cassandra. “I believe Mary [her sister-in-law] found it dull, but I thought it very pleasant. To sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room is a luxurious sensation.—Sometim
es we talked & sometimes we were silent; I said two or three amusing things, & Mr. Holder made a few infamous puns.” It is clear that on this occasion she experienced several overlapping sensations: that there is human comfort in such evenings and also the possibility for drama, even if it were not in the end fulfilled; that her own appreciation of such moments outdistanced Mary’s, which was a credit to her imaginative powers; and that Ashe Park glowed like a stage setting in which she possessed sufficient self-consciousness to see herself as a player, a clever woman, unmarried but capable of responding to such spontaneous gatherings and sparking the evening by making clever remarks—all carefully counted and afterward relished.
Despite these rescued and dramatized social events, she must often have been impatient with the idle chatter of her country friends. We can easily imagine that a woman with such a well-stocked intelligence would have longed for more cerebral discourse than the price of ham and the newest fashion in bonnets, and probably she did. She is sure to have remembered how, years earlier, she and lively Tom Lefroy had sat in the parlor at Steventon and chattered openly about the novel Tom Jones. Two young people, they had read and responded to the same titillating passages. It may be that that tidemark of engaged conversation was never again matched—and that she forever after made do with smaller fare.
Nevertheless, her conversation about the cost and use of domestic items seems genuine, and appears to sit side by side with more abstract observations on moral behavior. And almost always when she spoke of the price of apples or of some small turn in fashion, she managed to coax a strain of irony into her remarks, a reminder to herself and others that she understood perfectly the discrepancy between ideas and objects. “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me,” she once wrote Cassandra, meaning that she was able to mock the very person she was, a clever woman who was, nonetheless, able to invest herself in tasks that others might find tedious.
There were always a few servants in the several households Jane Austen occupied, but never so many that the family escaped a share of domestic duties. She was probably ambivalent about such tasks, taking at least a minor pleasure in what she was obliged to do. Routine was essential to her creativity; the grounding in domestic reality was useful to her fiction and allowed her a wider range of understanding. She did complain on at least one occasion, though, much later at Chawton, that “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb.” Her labor would have amounted to simple household sewing and to the planning of family meals and the ordering of supplies, not the actual acts of cooking, serving, or cleaning.
Economic restraint meant that she was locked into a quotidian life with its responsibilities for household management and that she was attached to a mixed community that bored her, amused her, and allowed her to be a full social being. More important, interaction with a large slice of society permitted her to observe and to gather material for her novels.
She often makes sharp remarks about her friends and speaks just slightly more obliquely about family members; almost everyone but Cassandra and her father suffered beneath her critical gaze. Her distinctions clearly entertain her or else she produces them to entertain others; she seems to have felt it an expression of her taste to criticize her neighbors for their fat necks and bad breath. She enjoys Miss Armstrong, the friend she met at Lyme Regis, but for the fact that she “seems to like people rather too easily.”
It is in her comments about other people that she sometimes loses her footing between malice and wit, confusing irony with injury. The more lethal of these barbs appear in her letters to Cassandra and were perhaps designed to please an aspect of her sister’s misanthropy that was otherwise hidden. Her novels espouse a far more generous appraisal of others. In Emma we read solemn and sensible advice that she herself often ignored: “It is very unfair to judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation. Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”
Within the family, she felt genuine affection for Cassandra and for her brother Henry. What was it about Henry that endeared him to her? “Oh! what a Henry,” she once said of him. Feckless is the term sometimes applied by others to his character: weak, unfocused. Of all the Austen brothers, it is Henry who appears to have lived the most hedonistically. James selected the church and stuck to it. Edward was plucked out to be a country gentleman and that was what he remained all his long life. Francis and Charles chose naval careers, where they thrived and were rewarded. Henry was educated for the church, sidestepped into the military, then became a banker, and, finally, following his bankruptcy, was ordained. His was a ring-around-the-rosy life, and it seems he took all his transformations with grace and with a lightness of heart. He married the woman he loved, his cousin Eliza de Feuillide, and after her death embarked on a second marriage. Constancy may not have been his strongest attribute, but he was constant, at least, in his love for his sister Jane. Only four years separated the two. His interests, like hers, were literary, and in an informal sense he acted as his sister’s agent, beginning in 1803 with the submission to a publisher of Northanger Abbey. His pride in Jane’s accomplishments was enormous. Made giddy by her success, he couldn’t help but reveal her name to a public that had no idea who had authored her novels. In his moments of personal distress, he required Jane’s presence, and perhaps it is this more than anything else that bound the two of them together. Interestingly, he is the only one of her brothers remembered in her will—with a bequest of £50.
Cassandra, sister and friend, is the most enigmatic presence in Jane Austen’s life. Just two years apart, the only daughters in a family of brothers, they shared a bedroom all their lives; most of their time was spent together and, when separated, they corresponded with great frequency. Cassandra would have been the first reader of all Jane Austen’s manuscripts, yet it was she who, out of prudence, recommended anonymity when the first novels were published. The younger sister always sought the favor of the older, always thinking of Cassandra’s entertainment and satisfaction. It is hard not to see Cassandra’s influence as infantilizing. Her sometimes cold critical comments about her sister’s books (Mansfield Park, in particular) may have been inhibiting. The relationship with Cassandra sustained Jane Austen, but perhaps also damaged her impulses and self-trust.
Eliza Hancock (later Eliza de Feuillide and still later Eliza Austen) was an important friend. Her wit and worldliness brought continental freshness to the Austen circle of friends. She was an enthusiastic reader of Jane Austen’s manuscripts and an encouraging presence, and it seems clear she preferred Jane to Cassandra.
Anne Lefroy may have lived the life of a conventional wife and mother, but her range of interests and her views were those of an independent consciousness. She had befriended the young Jane Austen eagerly after moving to the Steventon area, lending her books and taking the young girl’s writing seriously. The large difference in their ages was, curiously enough, not a barrier, and the friendship endured until Mrs. Lefroy’s death, which occurred on Jane Austen’s twenty-ninth birthday. The death was dramatic and shocking, a fall from a horse. Jane’s grief at the loss may have been stirred by an old spoon of resentment, for it was Mrs. Lefroy who was partly responsible for separating her from young Tom Lefroy many years earlier. The anniversary of Mrs. Lefroy’s death, occurring each year on Jane’s birthday, must have poisoned the day. Four years after the fatal accident, perhaps in an attempt to exorcise her mingled feelings, she wrote a rhapsodic poem in Anne Lefroy’s honor.
I see her here, with all her smiles benign
Her looks of eager love, her accents sweet;
That voice and countenance almost divine;
Expression, harmony, alike complete.
Listen: ’tis not sound alone—’tis sense,
’Tis genius, taste and tenderness of soul:
’Tis genuine warmth of heart without pretence,
In her lifetime Jane Austen frequently declared her lack of respect for schoolteachers, but Anne Sharp, the governess to her nieces and nephews at Godmersham, was young, animated, and intelligent. The two women became friends, visiting and corresponding. “Dearest Anne,” Austen addressed her, sharing with her the details of her life and expressing gratitude to her for her acts of friendship. Austen had enough respect for Miss Sharp to solicit her opinion about her later novels, Mansfield Park and Emma. Mrs. Elton was “beyond praise,” Anne Sharp wrote, and this remark offers a comment on the sense of irony the two women shared: Mrs. Elton, as readers of Emma know, is undeserving of any praise at all, but Jane Austen’s drawing of the egregious Mrs. Elton is a great accomplishment.
The Lloyd sisters, Mary and Martha, were old friends from Steventon days. Mary eventually married James Austen, becoming his second wife. Jane and Mary were never to be good friends, despite their closeness in age. The ten years between Martha and the younger Jane, however, did not diminish their very long friendship, first as neighbors and later as correspondents.
Some years later, when old Mrs. Lloyd had died, the Austen trio invited Martha to join their household. She remained with them in the following years—in Bath, Southampton, and finally, Chawton. She was an unmarried woman, without close family, and must have seemed to Jane and Cassandra another sister. She was welcomed for the congenial company she provided and no doubt for the financial help she may have contributed. At the age of sixty-three she became Francis Austen’s second wife. By this time Jane Austen had been dead for years, but it is almost certain that she would have blessed the new arrangement and welcomed her old friend as a true Austen sister.
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