Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  It was a fine large old house, built before the time of Queen Elizabeth I, with a Tudor porch, mullioned windows and a warren of corridors and passages. The older part was of flint and stone, possibly on medieval foundations, and in the middle of the seventeenth century two red brick gabled wings had been added, necessitating extra staircases. There was an immense hall and a supposedly haunted gallery. The walls were not papered but hung with tapestries and the open fireplaces still had firedogs, four-legged long metal supports for logs, instead of grates. There were portraits by the celebrated artist George Romney of Mr and Mrs Knight. This was the manor house, surrounded by a park. Edward offered his mother and sisters a much smaller house on the estate.

  Henry obligingly looked the house over for them and reported there were six bedrooms and garrets for storage. Mrs Austen daydreamed of employing a manservant who could sleep in one of the garrets. Jane hoped to be settled at Chawton by the end of the next summer so that Henry could visit them in October for shooting; if they made it early in September, Edward would be able to come after taking his boys back to Winchester.

  Jane determined to have as much social life as possible before leaving Southampton. Everybody in their circle seemed to be sorry they were going and everybody claimed to be acquainted with Chawton, speaking of it as a remarkably pretty village. They were all convinced they knew the house but habitually fixed on the wrong one.

  Jane and Martha had enjoyed a recent public ball. They arrived at nine thirty and left before midnight. The room was fairly full, with about thirty couples.

  The melancholy part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders! It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago! I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.

  Jane was approaching her thirty-third birthday and according to the standards of the day was on the shelf. She reported triumphantly that she had been asked to dance by a foreigner with handsome black eyes, whose name she did not know. Formal introductions no longer seemed indispensable to her. At this stage in her life such attention seemed flattering rather than insulting.

  After Christmas Jane was idle and missing her sister. Frank and Mary were at Portsmouth, and Jane had to send on more clothes. Mary had an abscess on a tooth, which had been opened. An evening party with Martha’s relatives had brought an unwelcome visitor, Miss Jane Murden, a relative of the Fowles who lived with them at Kintbury. She had refused to come earlier and sat ungracious and silent from seven till half-past eleven, ‘for so late was it, owing to the chairmen, before we got rid of them’, wrote Jane irritably. The last hour had been deadly dull, shivering and yawning round the fire. However, the supper of widgeon and preserved ginger had been delicious and all the apple butter had been eaten. Jane reflected that at Miss Murden’s age one might come to be as friendless and captious as she was. The prospect of a lonely, penurious old age was never far away. James’s good fortune still rankled.

  Edward’s wedding anniversary was 27 December, a day of sad remembrance at Godmersham. Jane talked with her fingers to a man totally deaf, and recommended a book to him. This was Corinna, a translation of Corinne, ou l'Italie by Madame de Staël, which had been published and twice translated into English in 1807. Miss Murden had found new lodgings with Martha’s help and was more cheerful. Mrs Austen sold some old or useless silver and bought six teaspoons, a tablespoon and a dessertspoon. Jane was sarcastic about the ‘magnificence’ of the sideboard and sighed over the way she had come down in the world. Mrs Digweed was looking forward to having the Austens as neighbours again. Jane hoped Mrs Digweed would enjoy the idea at least of renewed friendship but saw little likelihood of mutual entertaining on the Austens’ restricted income. The Austen women were more likely, said Jane bitterly, to become intimate with Mrs Digweed’s husband’s bailiff and his wife, who were said to be very good sort of people. ‘Very good sort of people’ was often a code phrase for ‘respectable, but not our class’.

  Jane was afraid of sinking into social limbo. Yet despite her clear-eyed recognition of her situation and prospects, she was happier and more optimistic than she had been for years. She looked forward to having a pianoforte again, as good a one as could be got for thirty guineas. Her old one had sold for eight. Henry was at Godmersham with his wife, Eliza, and Jane expected he would force himself to be cheerful with the children. Meanwhile Cassandra’s stay at Godmersham stretched on and on. Jane was looking forward keenly to Cassandra’s return, as she had been away now for several months.

  Halfway through January 1809 Jane writes to defend herself against Cassandra’s accusation of writing letters with little matter in them. ‘We are doing nothing ourselves to write about, and I am therefore dependent upon the communications of our friends, or my own wit.’

  Jane’s life was quiet, but international politics, in which she took an interest, were turbulent. Britain was still fighting the Peninsular War, supporting Spain against Napoleon. Under General Sir John Moore, the Battle of Corunna was fought on 16-17 January 1809 and the British saved Spain. Moore was fatally wounded and his dying words were, ‘I hope the people of England will be satisfied.’ Within living memory the poem ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’ by the Revd Charles Wolfe was a standard anthology piece. Jane was shocked that the dying Sir John spoke only of public opinion in England and sent messages to friends in London with no mention of religion. She commented tartly she was sorry to hear that Sir John’s mother was still alive: though a heroic son, he might not be Very necessary to her happiness’. Whatever this may mean, it seems oddly callous, even for sharp-tongued Jane. We are reminded of Dick Musgrove in Persuasion, whose mother’s grief at his loss is made to seem ridiculous. The death of children, whether adult or stillborn, is never less than dreadful for parents. This is another instance of Jane’s deliberately distancing herself from the motherhood she feared yet perhaps secretly yearned for. The St Albans was at Spithead, commanded by Jane’s brother Frank, having brought home the remnants of the British army.

  Jane closely followed these and other public events. She knew, though most people in her social circle did not, that the Portuguese Regent, Prince John of Braganza, who had been rescued from Napoleon by the British fleet and taken to Rio de Janeiro in 1807, was about to place the Portuguese army under British training and discipline. The rumours were circulating in Southampton but not in the rest of the country. Jane wrote, ‘my most political correspondents make no mention of it’. Few of the letters Jane Austen received survive. We would give a great deal to share in her political discussions.

  Domestically, the departure from Southampton was fixed for 3 April, Easter Monday 1809. They were to sleep that night at Alton and stay with the Revd Samuel Cooke and his wife at Bookham for a few days, hoping to be at Godmersham on 11 April, making a detour on their way to Chawton. Should the Cookes not be at home, they would arrive earlier.

  A letter had come from Paragon, rousing Jane to another burst of sarcasm. The Leigh-Perrots were complaining as usual. They found the house so dirty and damp that they had to spend a week at an inn. Their servant had let them down by finding another place. They had a new man but Mrs Leigh-Perrot did not like him: she found him and the new maidservant very, very inferior to the old. Jane might well have remembered her mother’s daydreams of employing a manservant at all and fretted on the difference money made to comfort.

  Jane was reading Memoirs of an American Lady by Mrs Anne Grant, and Margiana or Widdrington Tower, a new novel in five volumes by Mrs S Sykes. She found fault with the American Lady, but enjoyed Margiana, which as usual she read aloud to share with her mother. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain,' she wrote gleefully.

  It snowed that January confining Jane and her mother to the house. The b
ad weather resulted in a sensational item being reported in the papers. Jane wrote to Cassandra:

  Has your newspaper given a sad story of a Mrs Middleton, wife of a farmer in Yorkshire, her sister and servant being almost frozen to death in the late weather - her little child quite so? I hope this sister is not our friend Miss Wood; and I rather think her brother-in-law had moved into Lincolnshire, but their name and station accord too well. Mrs M and the maid are said to be tolerably recovered, but the sister is likely to lose the use of her limbs.

  With the poor weather, Jane was forced to miss church two weeks running. Jane and her mother were reading Woman, or Ida of Athens by Miss Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, which ‘must be very clever, because it was written as the authoress says in three months.’ They had as yet read only the preface but Lady Morgan’s previous novel, The Wild Irish Girl, did not lead Jane to expect much. ‘If the warmth of her language could affect the body, it might be worth reading in this weather. I must leave off to stir the fire and call on Miss Murden.’

  Resuming her letter Jane reported on Miss Murden‘s lodgings, behind a chemist’s shop. There was a neat parlour behind the shop itself for her to sit in, not very light as the house was built three rooms deep and the parlour was in the middle. Jane wrote ironically that it was, however, very lively from the sound of the pestle and mortar. Until halfway through the twentieth century chemists used to grind and roll their pills in their shops instead of buying them ready packed from pharmaceutical companies. Miss Murden sometimes sat with the Austens and went for walks with Jane, which could be embarrassing, as she talked too loudly.

  Charles had taken a small prize, a French schooner laden with sugar, but it sank in bad weather. It was now the end of January but Jane’s September letter was the latest he had received. Charles wrote from Bermuda on Christmas Day delighted to say that ‘my beloved Fanny was safely delivered of a fine girl… the baby besides being the finest that ever was seen is really a good looking healthy young lady of very large dimensions and as fat as butter … the October and November mails have not yet reached us so that I know nothing about you of late…’ Innocently he added a poignant postscript: ‘I am very anxious to hear how dear Elizabeth has got through her late confinement.’

  Jane complained of snow, wind, rain and mud, and leaks in the house, which had necessitated emptying cupboards. This turned out to be due to a blocked gutter, later cleared.

  She refused to be interested in Hannah More’s didactic tale Coelebs in Search of a Wife which she misread as ‘Caleb’, explaining, ‘I do not like Evangelicals.’ Reproved for carelessness by her sister she defended herself by saying Caleb sounded honest and unpretentious while ‘Coelebs’ sounded pedantic and affected.

  Edward’s motherless little girls, Lizzie and Marianne, aged nine and seven, were sent to a boarding school in Wanstead until their sister Fanny could engage a governess for them. This was a big responsibility for a girl of sixteen, who had in many respects to take her mother’s place. Fanny was conscientious and took her duties as acting mistress of Godmersham seriously It must have been even more traumatic for Lizzie and Marianne to be banished from their luxurious home and packed off to live with strangers after the terrible shock of their mother’s sudden death. Edward was too grief-stricken to marry again. In 1811 when a Miss Allen was teaching his daughters, Jane, who so easily might have been reduced to governessing herself, spared the woman a kind thought: ‘By this time I suppose she is hard at it, governing away. Poor creature! I pity her, though they are my nieces.’ The children seem to have been too lively for Miss Allen, for she lasted less than seven months.

  Jane remained in touch with a previous Godmersham governess, Anne Sharp, who had worked there for two years, leaving in January 1806. Miss Sharp’s next job was as governess to one six-year-old girl but this was too much for her and after a couple of months she became companion to her employer’s crippled sister. In 1811 Miss Sharp was teaching four daughters of the widowed Lady Pilkington. The baronetcy had descended to Sir William of whom Miss Sharp wrote ‘highly’ and Jane said, I do so want him to marry her! There is a dowager Lady presiding there, to make it all right.’ But nothing of the kind happened. Eventually Miss Sharp set up her own boarding school.

  Miss Sharp found Mansfield Park excellent, but preferred Pride and Prejudice and rated Emma between the two. She visited Chawton in June 1815. James-Edward Austen-Leigh met her at Chawton in 1820 after Jane was dead and told his half-sister Anna that she was horribly affected but quite amusing. If Jane had been the snob she is sometimes accused of being, she would not have formed a friendship with a governess, often regarded as merely a superior kind of servant. She wrote to her as ‘My dearest Anne’. Jane respected Miss Sharp as an independent woman who earned her own bread.

  The family were wanting to leave Southampton but Mrs Austen fell ill in March. They were due at Godmersham in April but were delayed once more. Frank’s wife had moved to a cottage near Alton and was expecting another baby in June. Frank had gone to China and was likely to be away for two years.

  The Austens left Southampton on Easter Day, 2 April 1809. They went first to the Cookes at Bookham, reached Godmersham on 15 May and stayed till the end of June. On 12 June poor Cassandra’s white pelisse was covered with black mud when a gust of wind blew it against the wheels of the carriage as she was getting out. White was a fashionable colour and must have been difficult to keep clean; mud and dirt at the time included plenty of horse manure.

  Eliza de Feuillide arrived at Godmersham on 22 June. She and Henry were moving from their little house at Brompton, then a village, to a smart one at 64 Sloane Street. Fanny was so impressed that she wrote in her diary that Uncle and Aunt Henry Austen had gone away early ce matin. Quel horreur!' Eliza presumably, to Fanny’s dazzled eyes, exemplified the social polish Fanny was later to conclude Jane and Cassandra lacked. Fanny despised her aunts for liking the everyday names Robert and Susan, which she considered a depraved taste. Young Fanny, dear as she was to her Aunt Jane, was rather a snob.

  17

  Regeneration

  JANE AUSTEN’S WRITING falls into two distinct phases, Steventon and Chawton, before and after the unhappy period at Bath. The early burlesques, Catharine, or the Bower and the original drafts of her early novels were written at Steventon before the move to Bath in 1800.

  An early draft of Pride and Prejudice titled First Impressions was begun in October 1796 and finished in August 1797 when Jane was twenty-one, the same age as its heroine Elizabeth Bennet. Jane’s niece Anna, aged four and living with her grandmother, listened to Jane reading the story aloud to her sister. Downstairs little Anna chattered of Elizabeth and Darcy, arousing anxiety in her aunts who wanted to keep the project a secret; anyway there were various real Elizabeths and Janes around, which could have been embarrassing.

  Jane’s proud father wrote to a publisher called Cadell three months after First Impressions was finished, offering ‘a manuscript novel comprising three volumes about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina’. He asked Mr Cadell if he would be interested in looking at the work with a view to entering into some arrangement for publication ‘at the author’s risk or otherwise’. By this time Jane had started work on an early version of Sense and Sensibility called Elinor and Marianne of which nothing survives though it is believed to have been epistolary. The offer of First Impressions was rejected by return of post and after such discouragement no further effort was made to publish the novel until Jane’s father was dead and she was in need of money

  Northanger Abbey, originally called Susan, was written in 1798-9. In some ways it reverts to the parodies Jane had been writing since she was fifteen, but was not published until 1818, the year after her death, along with her last novel, Persuasion.

  A few months before she started First Impressions Jane half seriously told her sister in a letter acknowledging Cassandra’s praise of her last communication that she wrote only ‘for fame, and without any view to pecuniary emolument’. I
n fact she never did seek fame though it later crept up on her. The idea of writing for ‘pecuniary emolument’ on the other hand almost certainly did cross her mind.

  During 1802 or early 1803 Jane made a second copy of Susan (a different book entirely from her epistolary novel Lady Susan), inserting a reference to Fanny Burney’s Belinda, published in 1801, in the famous defence of novels and novelists at the end of the fifth chapter. Henry, through his lawyer Mr William Seymour, offered the manuscript to Richard Crosby and Son of Stationers Hall Court, Ludgate Street, London. It was accepted and Jane received £10 for the copyright. Outright sales of books with such one-off payments were customary until much later in the nineteenth century. Sometimes the author paid for the printing. Jane now had some welcome cash and the consciousness of success, but the book was not published. Crosby hung on to the manuscript for six years. He advertised Susan in Flowers of Literature in 1803, but never printed it, possibly realizing it made fun of the Gothic romances which were his own bread and butter. Jane Austen was totally unknown and he did not want to risk upsetting his established authors by her mockery. Years later, after Jane had found recognition as the author of Pride and Prejudice, Henry took satisfaction in telling Crosby what a mistake he had made.

  During the Bath sojourn, Jane made only one creative attempt. She started another novel and completed some 17,500 words. This was The Watsons. She never finished it, but later recycled some of its incidents and names.

  In 1809 Jane remembered the sale of Susan to Richard Crosby. Using the pseudonym ‘Mrs Ashton Dennis’ and giving her address as the Post Office at Southampton, she wrote him a sharp letter on 5 April, reminding him that early publication had been stipulated for at the time of sale. If the manuscript was lost, she told Crosby, she could supply a duplicate. If she received no reply she would seek publication elsewhere.