Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  It was a grey chilly morning and there were no heaters or flowers in the narrow-windowed church. No one was there but the wedding party, and no one else was asked to the breakfast, to which they sat down as soon as they got back. The wedding feast consisted of an ordinary good breakfast of the period: tongue, ham and eggs, bread, buttered toast, hot rolls. To mark the occasion, there was hot chocolate and there was a wedding cake. The bride and groom left soon afterwards as they had a long day’s journey to Hendon in front of them. Ben’s brother had a house there. Jane wondered whether the air there was polluted, as it was only twelve miles from London. Nowadays Hendon and other villages have long been swallowed up in what William Cobbett and Jane Austen called the Great Wen, or blemish on the face of the countryside.

  Anna kept on writing for a while but after Jane died did not have much heart to continue. She was soon the busy mother of seven children. In one of her recurrent fits of despondency she threw her unfinished novel into the fire. Anna’s third daughter Fanny-Caroline, born 1820, sat on the rug watching the papers blacken and curl and throw out sparks. However, finding herself widowed with, in Cassandra’s words, a large family, a narrow income and indifferent health’, Anna published a novella, Mary Hamilton, in the Literary Souvenir for 1833 and two small books for children, The Winter’s Tale (1841) and Springtide (1842). She attempted to finish Jane’s uncompleted novel Sanditon but only managed some 20,000 words.

  Motherless Fanny Knight had written to Jane in November 1814 to ask her advice about Mr Plumptre, the boyfriend whom she had at first fancied but was now uncertain about. Consulted in confidence, Jane concealed the letter even from Cassandra. She begged Fanny to write something which could be read or told to other people. The young man was worthy but Fanny found him dull and was worried he might become Evangelical. Jane, who had previously been blunt about her dislike of Evangelicals, was more cautious now: she was not convinced that everybody ought not to be Evangelical. Fanny replied in a letter now lost, and Jane responded that she and Fanny attached different meanings to the word. It would be illuminating if we could only know what she meant here. She disliked Edward Cooper’s sermons as too full of ‘regeneration and conversion’, which offers some clue. Fanny’s young man was so strict in his views that he thought dancing and social amusements should be avoided by Christian people. Jane and Fanny were both sincere Christians but such negation seemed excessive. Wisdom was better than wit, Jane continued. But on the other hand Fanny must not think of accepting him unless she really did like him. If Fanny did not want to marry him she must behave coldly so he would conclude that he had been deceiving himself. She warned Fanny not to rely on any other person’s opinions but to trust only her own feelings. Nothing could be worse than to be bound to one man and preferring another.

  I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time … but it is no creed of mine … that such disappointments kill anybody,’ wrote Jane with her usual robust common sense. Fanny decided to throw coldness into her manner.

  Jane took a hint from Fanny’s letter. ‘Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively. The dirty shaving rag was exquisite! Such a circumstance ought to be in print. Much too good to be lost,' wrote the published novelist. She would remember Fanny and the dirty shaving rag when she made Harriet Smith in Emma fetishize Mr Elton’s broken stub of leadless pencil and scrap of sticking plaster.

  Fanny would be glad to hear that the first edition of Mansfield Park had sold out. Jane told Fanny the rich man’s daughter, frankly, T am very greedy and want to make the most of it; but as you are much above caring about money I shall not plague you with particulars. The pleasures of vanity are more within your comprehension and you will enter into mine at receiving the praise which every now and then comes to me, through some channel or other.’ People were readier, though, to borrow and to praise than to buy, said Jane, making the usual complaint of authors. ‘Though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls pewter too.’

  Towards the end of November Edward and his eldest son took Jane to London to stay with Henry and negotiate a second edition of Mansfield Park. Egerton was unwilling to reprint and the second edition came out from John Murray in 1816 with corrected nautical details in the Portsmouth scenes thanks to help from Frank, conveniently near at hand in the Great House, which Edward had lent him. Henry was still at 23 Hans Place.

  Jane went to the theatre and saw Miss Eliza O’Neal in David Garrick’s Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage. The plot concerns a grandfather who wants to adopt a child on condition it is separated from its mother, and a husband who returns from afar to find that his wife, thinking him dead, has remarried. Mrs Siddons in the part had wrung tears from audiences but was now retired. The acting as usual disappointed Jane, because at this period it tended to be highly stylized and rhetorical, and with her sharp nose for anything false she longed for something more natural. 'I took two pocket handkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either,’ she wrote drily.

  James-Edward, hearing of a possible second edition of Mansfield Park, sent his Aunt Jane an anonymous request for a fourth volume giving the ‘useful and amiable’ married life of Edmund and Fanny. The only fault of the novel, wrote the admiring nephew, was in being too short.

  She visited Charles’s daughters who were with their Palmer relations in Keppel Street. Three of her brothers were now widowers. She went to see Anna in Hendon and reported to Fanny that Anna’s having a pianoforte was foolishness as her playing would never amount to anything and the couple would wish the twenty-four guineas had been laid out in sheets and towels. Anna had bought a purple pelisse. ‘I do not mean to blame her. It looked very well and I daresay she wanted it. I suspect nothing worse than its being got in secret, and not owned to anybody. She is capable of that, you know.’ Perhaps Anna had been spending her husband’s money behind his back.

  After Christmas Cassandra and Jane went to Winchester to stay with Mrs Heathcote and her sister Alethea Bigg, now living at No. 12 Cathedral Close. It had been Jane’s most fruitful year to date.

  22

  Royal Favour, 1815-16

  ON 2 JANUARY 1815 Cassandra and Jane left Winchester for Steventon, staying till 16 January calling on the Bramstons at Oakley Hall, the Portals at Laverstoke and the Rector of Ashe, John Henry George Lefroy He and his wife had six children and were to have five more. Later in the year their five-year-old son went to stay with Ben and Anna. Jane thought him terribly in want of discipline and hoped he got ‘a wholesome thump or two whenever it was necessary. Physical punishment of children was taken for granted. Jane wrote calmly in an early letter that Edward’s eldest boy had been put into his first breeches and soundly whipped into the bargain.

  In March Napoleon escaped from Elba and took over France again, ruling from Paris. Only the battle of Waterloo in June finished the war. Napoleon was exiled to the island of St Helena where he died some years later. Lord Byron wrote a poem as spoken by Bonaparte which began:

  Farewell to the Land where the gloom of my Glory

  Arose and o’ershadowed the earth with her name -

  Jane liked it enough to copy it out and keep it.

  Charles was in the Mediterranean. On 6 May he wrote to Jane from Palermo telling her that when he had praised Walter Scott’s novel Waverley in conversation another man had told him there had been nothing for years to compare with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. This person, a nephew of the late Charles James Fox, was however not so fond of Mansfield Park. Mrs Austen too liked Waverley only second to her own daughter’s books.

  James’s wife, Mary, came to stay at Chawton Cottage, bringing her observant daughter Caroline, now aged ten, with her. Caroline regarded Cassandra coolly but adored Jane. Cassy, Charles’s eldest girl, lived at Chawton intermittently with her grandmother and aunts, educated by Cassandra, and Frank’s Mary-Jane was often there as well. Jane supplied the children with dressing-up clothes and played house with them. She alwa
ys told them that Cassandra knew more than she did and could teach them things better than she could. Caroline received this in polite silence, preferring Jane. In later life she believed that Jane genuinely looked up to her elder sister. ‘The most perfect affection and confidence ever subsisted between them - and great and lasting was the sorrow of the survivor when the final separation was made,’ wrote Caroline.

  The Knight family did not come to Chawton the summer of 1815, as there were celebrations for young Edward’s coming of age. His elder sister Fanny had to arrange his twenty-first birthday party, though there had been none for her. Jane had finished Emma on 29 March and began Persuasion on 8 August. She probably made little headway as that day Ben and Anna Lefroy arrived. They were moving from Hendon to a farmhouse called Wyards, within walking distance of Anna’s grandmother and aunts. Meanwhile Ben and Anna stayed at Chawton Cottage. Anna was Mrs Austen’s favourite granddaughter and the old lady was delighted to have the young couple in the house, and about to settle so near.

  Jane was so disgusted with Egerton that Emma was not offered to him. By 29 September it had received a favourable report from John Murray’s reader, though he felt it needed a little subediting. This reader, William Gifford, was also editor of the Quarterly Review. Murray sat on the manuscript for three weeks, thinking it would do no harm to let Jane Austen sweat a little.

  That autumn she was in London again. Henry was suffering from ‘a dangerous fever’ of some kind. Indeed, he was expected to die and his brother James was summoned to the house. Jane nursed Henry through his illness and then his slow convalescence. He was dosed with calomel, a grey powdery medicine whose mercury and chlorine were probably poisoning him. The apothecary took twenty ounces of blood on two consecutive days and threatened to take another twenty on the third. Henry was an excellent patient, lying quietly in bed and ready to swallow anything. He lived on tea, aperient medicine and barley water. No wonder his recovery was slow. Jane sent her dirty washing home by Collyer’s coach and laid plans for changing places with Cassandra when Henry next went to Oxford on business.

  Murray, who had spotted a winner, offered £450 for Emma but wanted the copyrights of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility included. Jane was angry and told Cassandra wearily that he was a rogue and she was likely to end up publishing Emma herself.

  Before his collapse Henry dictated a letter to Murray. He found Murray’s praise of the novel satisfactory but quibbled with the terms, pointing out that his sister had cleared as much as Murray was offering by the sale of the small first edition of Mansfield Park. Jane wrote requesting a meeting. ‘A short conversation may perhaps do more than writing,’ she suggested. Eventually a deal was struck: Murray would publish 2,000 copies of Emma on commission and would print a second edition of Mansfield Park with a print run of 750, also on commission.

  Anna had had a baby, making her half-sister Caroline, now ten years old, an aunt. Jane wrote kindly to Caroline, ‘Now that you are become an aunt, you are a person of some consequence … I have always maintained the importance of aunts.’

  Jane corrected the proof sheets of Emma during this time. Writing to Cassandra, she noted that the printer had queried her spelling of ‘arrowroot’, which she had written as ‘arraroot’. We remember that in the novel Emma sends some to Jane Fairfax, who proudly rejects it. It was until fairly recently a favoured invalid food, farinaceous, bland and easily digested.

  Fanny came to stay and went with Jane to Keppel Street to see Charles’s children. Henry’s medical man, Mr Haden, admired Jane’s work, and Fanny found him delightfully clever as well as handsome. Jane liked him as well. He was invited for the evening but to Jane’s dismay Mrs Latouche and Miss East invited themselves to drink tea after dinner. She told Cassandra she was heartily sorry they were coming. She and Henry were living well on hare and rabbits from Godmersham and pheasants from the Fowles, which cheered Jane up. ‘From seven to eight the harp; at eight Mrs L and Miss E arrived.’ For the rest of the evening, there seems to have been crowding to the point of discomfort: the two visitors, Henry and Jane all squeezed on to the sofa, with Fanny and Mr Haden sitting opposite. Mr Haden was invited to dinner next day He was currently reading Mansfield Park and preferred it to Pride and Prejudice.

  Mr Haden was a bright young man with a medical degree from Edinburgh and he admired Fanny He was also musical. Jane enjoyed his clever conversation and although she considered his opinion, lifted from Shakespeare’s Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, that unmusical people were fit for every kind of wickedness, an 'insanity’, she liked him. Cassandra was worried that her darling niece, the eldest daughter at Godmersham, was engaging in a flirtation with a mere apothecary. Apothecaries ranked low in the social scale and their precise status was defined by the Apothecaries’ Act of 1815. They were below surgeons, who ranked below physicians. Physicians alone among medical men ranked as gentlemen. Physicians prescribed. Surgeons operated. Jane told Cassandra that Mr Haden had never been an apothecary: he was a ‘Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature on two legs, something between a man and an angel…'She refrained from establishing Mr Haden’s exact status. ‘We have been very little plagued with visitors this week,’ added the author, preoccupied with her proof sheets. Edward took Fanny back to Kent on 8 December, after another musical evening.

  One day a second and grander doctor who had been called in, Dr Matthew Baillie, who had treated Henry earlier for chest trouble, mentioned to Jane that the Prince, later to become King George IV, was a great admirer of the novels, adding that he read them often, and even kept a set in each of his residences. The Prince, though dissolute in his private life, was a man of taste and culture with an interest in languages, history, art and literature. He commissioned the Brighton Pavilion, a palace on the Indian model, with rooms in the Japanese and Chinese manner. It is a magnificent extravaganza. He died with debts of £400,000. Although Jane Austen’s name had never appeared on any title page her identity was becoming known and the doctor knew that the quiet woman then approaching forty was the author of Pride and Prejudice.

  On hearing that the author whose fictions he so much enjoyed was in London the Prince as a mark of royal favour sent his librarian the Revd James Stainier Clarke to call on her. Mr Clarke announced that he had the Prince’s instructions to show her the library and to pay her every possible attention.

  Jane accordingly went on 13 November 1815 to Carlton House, the Prince’s London residence, and looked at the library, Carlton House was small but luxurious. A hall with green walls and Ionic columns of brown Siena marble led into ante-rooms and drawing rooms of crimson, gold, blue and rose, with flowered carpets and elaborate drapes of velvet and satin. The sombre richness of the blue velvet closet, bronze and blue and gold, contrasted with the opulent crimson drawing room with its gilded plaster, buhl and ormulu in every corner. On the south side overlooking the Mall were a conservatory that reminded her of a cathedral, an Ionic dining room, a Gothic dining room and a Gothic library.

  During the visit Mr Clarke declared that if she were at work on another novel she might if she chose dedicate it to the Prince himself. Not caring at all for the Prince, Jane decided to ignore this suggestion. When Henry and Cassandra heard of this they explained that it was not so much a request as a royal command. Jane took the hint and sent the dedication of Emma to the printer at once.

  If any reader should imagine the self-satisfied pomposity of Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice a caricature, he or she has only to read the correspondence between Jane Austen and Mr Clarke. He was one of the pests authors are beset by, proffering unasked advice on how to write their books. He wanted her to write a novel about the habits of life and character and enthusiasm of a clergyman - who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country - who should be something like Beattie’s Minstrel

  Silent when glad, affectionate though shy

  And now his look was most demurely sad

  And now he laughed aloud ye
t none knew why.

  Neither Goldsmith, nor La Fontaine in his Tableau de Famille have in my mind quite delineated an English clergyman, at least of the present day fond of, and entirely engaged in, literature: no man’s enemy but his own. Pray dear madam think of these things.

  Mr Clarke wanted not just the cosy pleasure of identifying with a fictional character: his demand on Jane Austen was for a flattering portrait of himself. She laughed at his request and later made private fun of it. His literary allusions were to a long poem by James Beattie (1735-1803), The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius, and to a French translation of a work originally written in German. Jane wrote on 11 December 1815 that she had arranged for a copy of Emma to be sent to Carlton House three days in advance of publication. She hoped that to those who preferred Pride and Prejudice it would not seem less witty than its predecessor, and to those who preferred Mansfield Park it would not appear at all inferior in good sense. Tactfully she added:

  I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note … But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man’s conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy of which I know nothing - or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman, who like me knows only her own mother-tongue and has read very little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman. And I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned, and uninformed, female who ever dared to be an authoress.