21
A Brief Peace, 1814
IN MARCH OF 1814, Jane took the opportunity offered by a journey in a post chaise with Henry to London to read Mansfield Park aloud. Henry’s approval was all that Jane had hoped for. He said, shrewdly enough, that it was different from Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but did not think it at all inferior to either of them. Jane only had time to read as far as Maria Bertram’s ill-fated marriage to Mr James Rushworth, owner of the magnificent Sotherton estate, and feared that Henry had already gone through the most entertaining part. Henry took most kindly to Lady Bertram and her sister Mrs Norris and warmly praised the drawing of the characters. He understood them and liked Fanny. He admired the characterization of Henry Crawford in so far as Crawford was a clever, pleasant man. Jane must have been reading the proof sheets as the book was published the following May A fragment of a letter from Jane, possibly to Frank, mentions that Mansfield Park was due out before the end of April. It had been due out in April, but was delayed. When Henry Austen had reached the third volume he ‘defied anybody to say whether Henry Crawford would be reformed, or would forget Fanny in a fortnight/ A week later Henry had finished Mansfield Park and his admiration had not lessened.
Jane liked to read the latest publications. She had enjoyed reading The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina, a novel by Eaton Stannard Barrett, published the previous year. It was ‘a delightful burlesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style’. She wrote, ‘I have read The Corsair, mended my petticoat and have nothing else to do.’ The Corsair was a new poem by Byron. She was exercised about the six weeks’ official mourning for the Queen’s brother, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Most people at parties were wearing black but Jane had felt comfortable in brown. She decided to trim her lilac sarcenet with black ribbon, since ribbon trimmings were all the fashion in Bath and she hoped would do elsewhere.
During that visit Jane had the good luck to see the actor Edmund Kean at Drury Lane Theatre in his first London part, Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. For once she was not disappointed. She could find no fault with him anywhere and said his scene with Tubal was exquisite. She wanted to see Kean again, but, apart from him and Miss Smith, who did not quite come up to Jane’s expectation, the play was badly cast and the whole dragged. The Indian jugglers, who gave daily performances in Pall Mall, seem to have been more satisfactory.
Jane’s judgment that Kean was different from other actors of the day seems validated, though he was small and his voice was harsh. Lord Byron, who never met Jane Austen, saw the same production and enthused about Kean’s acting: he said it was a new and natural style. William Hazlitt said Kean’s was a radical reinterpretation of the part. Melesina Trench, author of Remains, a memoir, saw Kean as Richard III and said he was like a lion in a cage. Coleridge said watching him was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Mary Russell Mitford, however, sneered that the ‘monarch of the stage’ was a little insignificant man, slightly deformed and ungraceful, unpleasing to eye and ear.
Jane’s mother had asked her to buy some tea but had given her no money. Jane was regretting the rise in the price of tea: they dealt with the firm of Twinings, which is still trading at the end of the twentieth century.
There was the usual problem of transport. Jane’s letter to Cassandra sounds almost farcical, but their difficulties were real and acute:
By a little convenient listening, I now know that Henry wishes to go to Godmersham for a few days before Easter… there can be no time for your remaining in London after your return from Adlestrop. You must not put off your coming therefore; and it occurs to me that instead of my coming here again from Streatham, it will be better to join me here … Henry finds he cannot set off for Oxfordshire before the Wednesday which is the 23 rd…
The Godmersham family arrived at Chawton Great House for two months, accompanied by Edward’s in-laws. This made Fanny happy: she preferred her maternal grandmother the dowager Lady Bridges to Grandmama Austen.
Mansfield Park was advertised on 19 May in the Star, at eighteen shillings, ‘by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice’. Amazingly, there seem to have been no reviews but the book was a commercial success and Jane made a profit of £350. Jane collected opinions from family and friends. Frank did not think it on the whole as good as Pride and Prejudice but Fanny Price delighted him and so did Aunt Norris. He admired the dialogue. ‘Mrs’ Augusta Bramston of Oakley Hall had thought Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice downright nonsense and hoped to like Mansfield Park better. Having struggled through the first volume Mrs Bramston congratulated herself on having ‘got through the worst’.
Cassandra thought it quite as clever, though not as brilliant, as Pride and Prejudice. Louisa Knight, Edward’s fourth daughter and Jane’s godchild, remembered that Cassandra had tried to persuade Jane Austen to let Mr Crawford marry Fanny Price but the author stood firm. A Mrs Carrick wrote shrewdly, ‘All who think deeply and feel much will give the preference to Mansfield Park.’ Mrs Grant of Laggan, a writer herself, wrote to a friend that its picture of manners was accurate and the moral was ‘rather insinuated than obtruded’. Lady Anne Romilly recognized it as true to life, with ‘a good strong vein of principle running through the whole’. The Earl of Dudley preferred Austen to Edgeworth because her plots were better constructed, she had more feeling, and he was relieved that Jane never plagued the reader with ‘chemistry, mechanics or political economy, which are all excellent things in their way, but vile cold-hearted trash in a novel’.
Fanny Knight was delighted with her namesake, Fanny Price, but wanted ‘more love’ between her and Edmund. She thought Edmund’s attraction to an unprincipled woman like Mary Crawford improbable, and was not convinced that Edmund could countenance a marriage between Fanny Price and Henry Crawford. The Cookes at Bookham praised Mansfield Park.
Bookham was near Leatherhead, and it is believed that Jane used the little town as her model for Highbury in Emma. Jane went to stay with the Cookes and maybe collected local colour.
There was a brief peace in the war with France, a lull which became the setting for Persuasion. Napoleon had been exiled to Elba. Frank was on shore as a half-pay captain. Charles was still on the Namur at the Nore but his relatives hoped he and his family would soon be settled on land.
King Louis XVIII had been restored to the French throne on 2 May 1814 by England, Prussia and Russia, after France had been twenty years a republic. There was to be a grand Allied thanksgiving service in St Paul’s Cathedral followed by public celebrations. Henry had collected Cassandra and she was staying with him in London. Jane wrote to her sister from Chawton on 13 June telling her to take care and not get trampled to death. In the event the Russian Emperor was so popular that crowds pressed forward to kiss his horse. The warning was no idle one: seven years previously seventeen people had been trampled to death at a public hanging. To celebrate the peace there were fireworks in Green Park where a Chinese pagoda and bridge unfortunately burst into flames and toppled into the canal. Henry the socialite was invited to a ball attended by the Czar, the King and the Prince Regent on 21 June. It cost £10,000 and was held at Burlington House. Jane was impressed: ‘Oh what a Henry!’
Meanwhile Jane was kindly encouraging her niece Anna, now twenty-one, to write. Some time in the summer of 1814, Jane told Anna that one of the manuscripts Anna had sent had entertained the whole family: Jane had read it aloud to Mrs Austen (‘your GM’) and ‘Aunt C’ and they had all enjoyed it. Anna’s Sir Thomas, Lady Helena and St Julian were 'very well done’, and Cecilia continued to be ‘interesting in spite of her being so amiable’. A few verbal corrections were all that Jane was tempted to make, she wrote, and then corrected Anna on a point of etiquette. ‘As Lady H is Cecilia’s superior, it would not be correct to talk of her being introduced; Cecilia must be the person introduced.’ Then she offered a correction of Anna’s style: ‘And I do not like a lover’s speaking in the third person �
�� it is not natural.’ However if Anna thought differently it did not matter. ‘I am impatient for more, and only wait for a safe conveyance to return this book.’
Jane’s eyes were giving out and she was in the middle of writing Emma. Fiction writing, when all the materials have to be self-generated, is a drain on the energies and demands intense concentration. Yet she found time to read and constructively criticize the amateur composition of her young niece. This generosity of time and effort cannot have come cheap.
A month or so later she wrote again to Anna approving of her title, Which Is the Heroine?, but expressing a preference for the original one, Enthusiasm. However, Anna may have changed the name because there was already a book called Les Voeux Téméraires; ou, L'Enthousiasme (Daring Desires; or, Enthusiasm) by Madame de Genlis. Jane responded to Anna’s detailed queries with fresh encouragement. Once again she put Anna right on a question of social etiquette. ‘I have … scratched out the introduction between Lord P and his brother and Mr Griffin. A country surgeon (don’t tell Mr C Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank. And when Mr Portman is first brought in, he would not be introduced as “the Honourable”. That distinction is never mentioned at such times; at least I believe not… And we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath … There you will be quite at home.’ She adds that she thinks a serious conversation ‘about the madness of otherwise sensible women on the subject of their daughters coming out is worth its weight in gold’. In a postscript she writes, ‘Twice you have put Dorsetshire for Devonshire. I have altered it. Mr Griffin must have lived in Devonshire; Dawlish is halfway down the county.’
Anna’s novels apparently were in the same mould as her aunt’s. In her maturity she decided they were worthless and destroyed them. In Jane’s critiques we see her usual concern for probability and social accuracy. In a letter to Cassandra written on 24 January 1813 she mentions a mistake that had crept into Mansfield Park. ‘I learn from Sir Carr that there is no Government House at Gibraltar. I must alter it to the Commissioner’s.’ She was referring to Sir John Carr’s book Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain, published 1811.
In August Jane was at 23 Hans Place in London as Henry had moved from his rooms in Henrietta Street to a house next door to his banking partner Mr Tilson. It was then nearly surrounded by fields, although behind Sloane Street. The fields were later built over to become Pont Street. Jane was agreeably surprised by the space and comfort of his rooms and the garden across which they talked to their neighbour was ‘quite a love’. Jane liked to live in the downstairs room that opened on to it. There were also a balcony and a conservatory. Henry employed one maid servant only, a creditable, clean-looking young woman, and a man.
James and Edward arrived: ‘their business is about teeth and wigs’, for being well into their forties they did not follow the fashion, as their younger brothers did, for wearing their own hair. Henry was friendly with Miss Harriet Moore and Jane was convinced he would soon remarry. Jane liked the idea of Miss Moore better than anybody else at hand, she told Cassandra. But nothing came of it.
Henry was talking of a visit to Chawton and mentioned the possibility of calling on friends on the way. In case this came to anything, Jane asked her sister to forward by Collyer’s coach her silk pelisse and a clean dressing gown which would come from the wash on Friday. On 2 September Jane was still at ‘delightful’ Hans Place, writing to Martha who was in Bath.
I shall have spent my twelve days here very pleasantly, but with not much to tell…two or three very little dinner parties at home, some delightful drives in the curricle, and quiet tea-drinkings with the Tilsons has been the sum of my doings.
Jane was amused by the latest fashions, describing them in detail: coloured petticoats with braces over white spencers, and enormous bonnets. Long sleeves seemed universal, even for formal wear, waists were high and bosoms covered. Flounces were in. Without drawing breath or marking a paragraph, she continues she has seen ‘West’s famous painting … the first representation of our Saviour which ever at all contented me’. Benjamin West was President of the Royal Academy, painter of historical and religious subjects. The painting Jane had seen was Christ's Rejection by the Elders. Another intelligent woman who saw the picture, Melesina Trench, however, disliked it: for her, it was neither natural nor sufficiently noble for divinity.
Henry was convinced that the American war, declared 1812, would ruin the British. They ‘cannot be conquered, and we shall only be teaching them the skill in war which they may now want’. Jane hoped that Britain, as a religious nation which she did not believe the Americans to be, would receive Heaven’s protection. Her religious feeling ran deep. She read sermons for pleasure as well as for edification.
On 31 August Charles’s wife, Fanny Palmer, gave birth to her fourth daughter, two weeks prematurely, on board ship. Everything went normally but a week later plump, pink-faced, blonde Fanny was dead, aged twenty-four. Her little girl lived only another fortnight. Edward set off at once to comfort his brother.
Charles resigned from the Namur and looked for service abroad on the 36-gun HMS Phoenix, which was off to the Mediterranean. He sent his three surviving daughters to their relatives in Keppel Street, where their sour-faced aunt Harriet Palmer looked after them. Mrs Austen disliked her though she admitted that Harriet was very good and very useful and that her ill-health was to be pitied. In 1820 Harriet became the children’s stepmother as well as their aunt when she married Charles as his second wife.
Edward’s claim to the Chawton estate was being contested by the Hintons and the Baverstocks, who had been the heirs until Thomas Knight and Thomas Knight II cut off the entail. They were looking for legal flaws in the disentailing documents. Jane’s home was under threat as, if Edward had to relinquish the Great House, then Chawton Cottage would have to go too. The matter was not settled until 1818, after Jane’s death, when Edward had to sell £15,000 worth of timber from Chawton to buy the Hintons off and raise another £15,000 for legal expenses.
Jane was hoping for her publisher’s account while in London. She had visited Catherine Hill (née Bigg) at Streatham and was distressed that Catherine’s young children should grow up with such an elderly father. He was twenty-four years older than his wife.
Back at Chawton Jane sent Anna criticisms of her latest effort, which are interesting as an indication of Jane’s own practice and show her further punctilious attention to social detail:
We are not satisfied with Mrs F’s settling herself as tenant and near neighbour to such a man as Sir T H without having some inducement to go there; she ought to have some friend living thereabouts to tempt her. A woman, going with two girls just growing up, into a neighbourhood where she knows nobody but one man, of not very good character, is an awkwardness which so prudent a woman as Mrs F would not be likely to fall into. Remember, she is very prudent; you must not let her act inconsistently. Give her a friend, and let that friend be invited to meet her at the Priory, and we shall have no objection to her dining there as she does; but otherwise a woman in her situation would hardly go there, before she had been visited by other families … Sir T H you always do very well; I have only taken the liberty of expunging one phrase of his … ‘Bless my heart’. It is too familiar and inelegant. Your GM [grandmother] is more disturbed at Mrs F’s not returning the Egertons’ visit sooner than anything else. They ought to have called at the parsonage before Sunday.
You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars …
You are now collecting your people delightfully… Three or four families in a country village is just the thing to work on … I wish you could make Mrs F talk more, but she must be difficult to manage and make entertaining, because there is so much good common sense and propriety about
her that nothing can be very broad…
Jane criticized Anna’s clichés such as Vortex of dissipation’ and said mildly her novel lacked incident. She turned to rival authors:
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths …
She meant it. Scott had recently published Waverley, his first novel. He however wrote a favourable review of Emma when it came out in 1816. Scott was created a baronet in recognition of his literary work in 1820.
Anna Austen married Benjamin Langlois Lefroy on 8 November 1814. He had promised James he would go into the Church. Jane Austen approved of him as sensible, very religious and with some independence, by which she meant money. The young couple met every day that summer, taking the short cut across the meadows which reduced the distance between the Steventon and Ashe rectories to not much more than a mile. They spent a lot of time walking together in the Steventon shrubbery. Mary was irritated at being kept out of it by their devotion to each other, which she declared was foolishness, but she and James consented to the match.
Weddings were often extremely quiet by our standards: Anna’s grandmother and aunts were not invited. Anna’s half-sister, Caroline, was a bridesmaid and Anne Lefroy, the bridegroom’s niece, was the other. They wore white frocks and had white ribbon in their straw bonnets. Between nine and ten o’clock the bride, Ben’s brother’s wife Sophia, Anne and Caroline were taken the half-mile to Steventon church in James Austen’s carriage. All the gentlemen walked. Anna was like her Aunt Jane, with bright brown hair and hazel eyes. She wore a dress of fine white muslin with a soft silk shawl, white shot with primrose, embossed with white satin flowers, and on her head a small cap trimmed with lace to match. Mr John Henry George Lefroy, the groom’s brother, performed the ceremony and James gave his daughter away.
Jane Austen Page 24