Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  About one proposal of marriage, however, there is no dispute. It came on 2 December 1802 from a man who was six years younger than Jane. Cassandra and Jane went on a visit to their old friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg, expecting to stay the usual two or three weeks. A week later, on a Friday, they turned up at Steventon Rectory where brother James had succeeded his father, now retired, all four women together in a carriage. Catherine and Alethea soon left after tearful and affectionate goodbyes.

  James and his wife, Mary, were even more surprised when Cassandra and Jane demanded that their brother should immediately take them to Bath where the family were now living. Well-brought-up women could not decently travel without a servant or a male protector and James had a carriage. He had to arrange for somebody to take his Sunday services for him at short notice. His sisters insisted, almost hysterically, that he must do it, though he could not understand what the panic was about. Eventually he received an explanation: Jane was running away from a suitor she had rashly accepted the previous evening. That morning she had changed her mind and told the young man so. To stay under the same roof after that would have been embarrassing so the sisters had fled.

  Jane was forced to throw herself on James’s mercy when she wanted to get back to Bath. A recurrent inconvenience for her was being dependent on lifts in other people’s carriages. Respectable women did not travel alone by stagecoach. Too often her friends and relations were going in the wrong direction or not far enough. Except for a few months when Jane was in her early twenties, her father had no carriage, and when he set one up found he could not afford it. This was as bad as having no car today.

  Jane’s rejected suitor was Harris Bigg-Wither, brother of Alethea and Catherine Bigg. His father, Mr Lovelace Bigg, added ‘Wither’ to his name when he inherited property in 1789. The daughters remained the Misses Bigg. Harris was a well-off country gentleman, tall and well-built, but plain, awkward and unpolished. He stammered, and could never have matched Jane’s intellect and cultivation. She dreaded marriage to a man of inferior understanding. Harris was, however, a sensible man and many girls would have been happy to marry him.

  To Jane he offered the prospect of social position and comfort with sisters-in-law who were already her friends. But she could not sacrifice her integrity in a marriage of convenience, though in refusing him she was giving up the prospect of luxury as mistress of Manydown, a stone Tudor mansion built round a courtyard, and with a splendid ironwork staircase going up to a handsome reception room on the first floor. She sacrificed the prospect of sharing a grand park, with oaks, a cedar and the fashionable ditch known as a ha-ha (because it created a barrier which deceived the eye from a distance), for a life of pinching and scraping. She knew the house well, for it was near Basingstoke and she had often spent the night there after dances. Manydown was demolished in 1965.

  As she was nearly twenty-seven, the age of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice and of Anne Elliot in Persuasion, she recognized this proposal as a last chance and the temptation to accept must have been powerful. She was already an ‘old maid’ according to the standards of her day, when girls were thought to have done well if they married in their teens and those in their twenties were considered to have lost the bloom of youth. With the pressure to marry so intense in her society because unmarried daughters were a financial burden on their parents, her renunciation was courageous indeed.

  Younger sons of good family in Holy Orders and with no money were plentiful in her circle: single men in possession of a good fortune were not. In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Patronage, published in 1814, a book Jane Austen read, a husband’s income of £2,000 entitled a woman to be called ‘pretty well married’ but to rate as Very well married’ she would need a man with £10,000 a year.

  The gap between a five-figure income and the actual stipends earned by well-born, well-educated clergymen, the younger sons with no inheritance to look forward to, was enormous. A contemporary of Jane’s described such young men as being ‘shoved off about the world to scramble through it as best they could with nothing but their good blood to help them.’ These were the potential husbands within Jane Austen’s own reasonable expectations. To be addressed by a landowner was beyond them.

  Cassandra later destroyed the letters covering the Bigg-Wither episode, but not before letting her niece Catherine Hubback, Frank’s daughter, read them. Catherine gathered that Jane was much relieved when the affair was over, and that she had never been attached to him. Harris Bigg-Wither two years later married Anne Howe Frith, an Isle of Wight heiress, who bore him five sons and five daughters. Jane’s letters between 1801 and 1804 are missing, either because they dealt with this matter which Cassandra considered private, or because Jane was generally disgruntled and Cassandra did not wish to be reminded of her sister’s unhappiness. She was living at the time in Bath, where she was never even moderately contented.

  It was a commonplace of the time that what was openly known as the ‘marriage market’ was overstocked with well-dressed spinsters, trapped at home with their parents with no hope of escape until an offer of marriage turned up. As Charlotte Lucas says in Pride and Prejudice, ‘I am not romantic, you know. I never was. All I ask is a comfortable home.' There were many like her, whose hopes were doomed to disappointment. The problems of the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice, of embarrassing relatives and minimal dowries, are solved in fairytale fashion. In real life their chances of marrying well would be small, and Mrs Bennet’s anxieties, however foolishly expressed, represent social and economic realities.

  Jane was fond of joking that she would like to marry the poet the Revd George Crabbe. According to her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh, she enjoyed Crabbe’s work ‘perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute and highly finished detail’. Jane wrote when the death of Crabbe’s wife was reported in 1813 that she had only just worked out from one of Crabbe’s prefaces that he was married. ‘Poor woman! I will comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any.’ This was a mere fantasy Jane never met Crabbe.

  Crabbe’s verses depict the lot of the rural poor with grim realism. They were written as a corrective to the fashion for romanticizing cottagers’ lives. Although Jane Austen does not foreground the poor in her books, they were all around her. As befitted the parson’s daughter she gave them presents of clothing. She reported to Cassandra on 24 December 1798 that she had given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens and Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins; amounting in all to about half a guinea’. She was overjoyed when her prosperous brother Edward gave her £10 to spend among the cottagers at Chawton, her final home, and when his adoptive mother bequeathed £20 to the parish’.

  Just before she died, having reached the age of forty as a single woman, Jane, supported mainly by the charity of her brothers, wrote to her niece Fanny Knight, not yet transformed into Lady Knatchbull, ‘Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor -which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.’ Earlier, though, she had warned Fanny that nothing could compare with the misery of being bound without love. Jane had seen a loving marriage between her own parents and knew its worth. Anything was better than marrying without affection, but on the other hand, as she was at pains to point out to Fanny, want of money, and sheets turned sides to middle were not inviting prospects. She comforted Fanny, who was in her mid-twenties and still single, by telling her not to be in a hurry; the right man would come at last.

  The choice of the right marriage partner was crucial, for marriage was all but indissoluble. Divorce was possible only for the very rich, as it needed an Act of Parliament. Husbands could divorce unfaithful wives, as Mr Rushworth in Mansfield Park does after Maria runs away with Henry Crawford, but it was difficult for a wife, however ill treated, to be legally freed from a violent or dissolute husband. Once married, wives who had chosen unwisely had to put up with it. />
  Unless a separate ‘settlement’ was made upon her, as soon as she married all a woman’s property and money became her husband’s. Yet risky as marriage was, it was considered better than single life. A man could not honourably break an engagement: only the lady herself could ‘release’ him from it. A man who broke his engagement was inviting legal action by the lady for breach of promise. Loss of marriage prospects was taken seriously, as lifelong maintenance and enhanced social status were at stake.

  Jane Austen was acutely aware of these problems long before they impinged on her personally. In her teens she began a novel called Catharine, or the Bower which starkly depicts the plight of women in her day. The heroine is an orphan living with a repressive aunt. Her only friends are the daughters of a neighbouring clergyman, reduced after his death to dependence on rich and stingy relatives. The elder has been shipped off, like Jane’s aunt Philadelphia Hancock, to India with the ‘fishing fleet’ and is ‘splendidly but unhappily married’. The younger has been taken by a titled relative as ‘companion’ to her daughters, an uncongenial and dependent position. The new parson and his wife are haughty and quarrelsome, well-born and ill-mannered. They had hoped for better things than a country living. The monotony of Catharine’s existence is broken by a visit from a fashionable family with a snobbish, brainless daughter whose shallow accomplishments ‘were now to be displayed and in a few years entirely neglected’. This girl, who prefigures Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey imagines vaguely that it must be delightful to voyage to Bengal or Barbadoes or wherever it is’, and be ‘married soon after one’s arrival to a very charming Man immensely rich’. Catharine’s bower is the only place where she can think and pull herself together when she is depressed. Its symbolism is obvious. Jane did not finish this early story but it shows the teenage writer able to see social situations with clarity. Another early work, The Three Sisters, written when she was about sixteen, deals with mercenary marriages.

  Despite her youthful popularity all Jane’s relationships with men came to nothing. Her obstinate heart forbade her to marry except for love. The flippant, flirtatious teenager faded into a middle-aged maiden aunt, dowdy not because she chose to be - indeed she loved clothes - but because she was poor. In a society where dowries were looked for, her poverty may well have been one of the reasons she never married. The plots of Jane’s novels and her refusal to marry for convenience make it plain that she believed in marrying for love, but she knew that in the real world most men had a way of falling in love with girls who brought money with them.

  We have reason to be selfishly grateful that Jane Austen never did attach a husband. With a growing family she would have found it hard to concentrate, even if she had married a rich man. If she had married a younger son or a clergyman she would have been equally poor and rather more harassed. Instead of direct descendants, she left us the inimitable novels.

  7

  Brothers and Their Wives

  JAMES, JANE’S ELDEST brother, followed his father to St John’s College, Oxford, before becoming ordained. Clever and studious, his intellectual precocity enabled him to matriculate, that is to enter the university, at fourteen. His great-uncle the Master of Balliol invited him to dine. Dr Theophilus Leigh was by then well over eighty. At that time Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates wore academic dress, square tasselled caps and gowns, at all times in public. James, entering his great-uncle’s lodgings, was taking off his gown as if it were an overcoat, as he did not yet know the etiquette. ‘Young man,’ said Dr Leigh, ‘You need not strip. We are not going to fight.’

  In 1786 James spent a year in Europe, visiting France, Spain and Holland. He was the most learned and scholarly of the Austen children.

  James’s first curacy was at Stoke Charity and his second at Over-ton, both within a few miles of Steventon. He kept his university terms, popping down at intervals to perform his clerical duties. Living in the small vicarage house at Overton, he went hunting with the Kempshott pack. At that time Kempshott Park was rented by the Prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV of England) and James was often in the field with royalty. Another hunting man, Mr William John Chute of the Vyne, presented James to the vicarage of Sherborne St John in 1792. While at Overton he did duty at nearby Laverstoke, where he met and fell in love with Anne Mathew, whose father, General Mathew, rented the manor house. James married in 1792, his father performing the ceremony. The bride’s mother was Lady Jane Bertie, daughter of the second Duke of Ancaster and sister of the third. James was twenty-seven. A country clergyman was not much of a catch, but Anne was well over thirty with a great deal of nose’, so the General accepted James as son-in-law and allowed the young couple £100 a year. James had, after all, expectations from James Leigh-Perrot. The Leigh family found him a living at Cubbington, Warwickshire. This brought the couple’s combined income up to £300 a year. Although nominally vicar, James never went to Cubbington, but employed a curate. He and Anne lived for a while at Court House, Ovington, but James needed a permanent home to take his pale, slender bride to, so his kind father employed him as curate at Deane and allowed him to live there rent free.

  This was generous, as the Deane house had previously been let to a tenant, Mrs Martha Lloyd. Mrs Lloyd and her unmarried daughters then moved to Ibthorpe (pronounced Ibthrop), about sixteen miles from Steventon and not far from Andover. Mrs Lloyd, a clergy widow, was the mother of Martha and Mary, close friends of Jane. Eliza Lloyd had married her cousin the Revd Fulwar Craven Fowle, who with his brother Tom (Cassandra’s fiancé) had been one of George Austen’s pupils. When Mrs Lloyd, Martha and Mary left Deane, Jane made Mary Lloyd a tiny ‘housewife’ or sewing set as a leaving present. This was a very small bag of white cotton with gold and black zigzag stripes. Inside was a strip of fabric pierced by tiny needles and fine thread. On a scrap of paper Jane had written:

  This little bag I hope will prove

  To be not vainly made,

  For if you thread and needle want,

  It will afford you aid.

  And as we are about to part,

  ‘Twill serve another end,

  For when you look upon the bag,

  You’ll recollect your friend.

  Settled at Deane, James and Anne lived above their modest means: she kept a close carriage and he a pack of harriers. They had spent £200 on furnishing the house.

  Great-uncle Francis Austen had died the previous year, aged ninety-three, and left £500 to each of his nephews. Now Charles had left home for the Naval Academy the pressure was less and Mr Austen cut down on the number of his pupils. Inflation meant that his charges had almost doubled, and were now £65 a year. Jane and Cassandra could have a spare bedroom next to theirs as a sitting room, always called the dressing room. The walls were cheaply papered and the furniture scanty, but Jane preferred it to the parlour downstairs as being more comfortable and elegant. She also now had a pianoforte. The room housed the sisters’ oval workboxes in Tonbridge-ware with ivory barrels holding reels of sewing silk.

  James and his parents lived not much more than a mile apart and he liked to drop in nearly every day. Anne, after a pregnancy which forced her to spend whole days in bed, gave birth safely to a daughter, Anna. Her mother-in-law, presumably summoned by James, got out of bed in the middle of the night and walked along the muddy lane by the light of a lantern to help her granddaughter into the world. Mrs Austen was a practical woman. Anna’s godparents were her great-uncle and great-aunt, the Duke of Ancaster and his Duchess, and her grandfather, General Mathew, who gave the sum of twenty guineas to be divided between the nurse and the maidservants. Seventeen-year-old Jane, now aunt both to James’s daughter, Anna, and Edward’s daughter, Fanny, wrote messages to her new nieces. When France declared war on Britain in February 1793 the generous General bought James an army chaplaincy. It was not intended that James should go to war, but that he should draw a salary and pay a substitute.

  James’s wife died suddenly when his little girl was two years
old. Anne ate her dinner normally but collapsed afterwards. An emetic was administered but it did not help. She lived only a few hours and was dead before the doctor arrived. He told James there was some internal ‘adhesion of the liver’ which he thought had probably ruptured.

  The young widower’s grief was intensified because little Anna wailed constantly for ‘Mama’. James, overwhelmed and feeling helpless, sent the child to his mother and sisters to bring up. Anna loved her aunts Jane and Cassandra and left affectionate reminiscences of them. They bought her a little cherrywood chair. Her grandfather Mathew was very proud of her and once whisked the little girl away from her aunts to a grown-up dinner party.

  After an inconclusive attraction to his cousin Eliza de Feuillide, who preferred her ‘dear liberty and dearer flirtation’ as she put it after she was widowed in 1794, James was married again in 1797 to Mrs Lloyd’s daughter Mary, whose face was seamed with smallpox.

  Eliza de Feuillide wrote to her cousin Phila Walter that Jane was much pleased with James’s match, which was natural as Jane had known Mary and liked her for a long while. ‘Despite being neither rich nor handsome, she is sensible and good-humoured,' said Eliza. Not only were the Lloyds old family friends but Mary was cousin to Tom Fowle, who was going to marry Cassandra and who had been promised a living in Shropshire by Lord Craven. The ties of love and friendship were being satisfactorily bound.