Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  Washday or no washday, Jane Austen was at the peak of her career. Murray had sent her the copy of the Quarterly Review in which Emma had been favourably noticed by an anonymous critic who, unknown to Jane, was her rival Walter Scott.

  In the year 1816 Jane was often surrounded by nephews and nieces. She lent them clothes for dressing up and joined in their make-believe. It is sometimes said that Jane did not like children. Like most adults she prefered them to be well-behaved. But she did her share of playing with her nephews and nieces, telling them stories and hearing them read. She encouraged them in their attempts at novel-writing, for James-Edward had acquired the family habit of scribbling. Jane wrote to Cassandra in September that his manuscript was extremely clever, written with great ease and spirit; if he could carry it on in the same way it would be a first-rate work and in a style to be popular. Tray tell Mary how much I admire it. And tell Caroline that I think it is hardly fair upon her and myself, to have him take up the novel line …’ For Caroline, though only eleven, was scribbling too.

  Now that Henry was a clergyman, he wrote Very superior sermons’, she told James-Edward, unlike Edward Cooper’s, which were distorted by his zeal for the Bible Society. Jane teased James-Edward about some of his own writings which had disappeared and defended herself from the charge of having stolen them. She did not think such a theft would be useful to her. What should I do … with your strong, manly spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?’

  Jane was here not apologising for smallness of scale, but staking her claim to be considered a finished craftsman, mistress of the art which conceals art and makes what is difficult look easy. Like his scribbling sisters, Anna and Caroline, James-Edward is noteworthy only for reminiscences of his distinguished aunt.

  In May, Jane and Cassandra had been for a few weeks to Cheltenham, then a spa town, from Chawton, breaking their journey at James’s house, Steventon Rectory, and leaving nine-year-old Cassandra Knight to stay with Caroline while they were in Gloucestershire. They also made a short stay with the Fowles at Kintbury, where Ful-war and Eliza were shocked by Jane’s visibly failing health. Jane went about her old haunts as if she did not expect to see them again. Cassandra returned to Cheltenham with James’s wife Mary and Caroline. The Cheltenham Chronicle of 1 August mentioned the Duke and Duchess of Orléans and Jane was entertained to think that the Duchess ‘drinks at my pump’. But Jane’s health was beyond the aid of spa waters.

  Charles had asked to visit Chawton with his three girls. Jane wanted to see him but worried about bedrooms: he did not mention bringing a maid but if he was going to bring one there would be no bed for him, let alone one for Henry. There were other general anxieties about one family member or another. Frank’s wife, Mary, seldom seemed quite well: 'Little Embryo is troublesome, I suppose,’ wrote Jane, caustic as usual about mothering. Perhaps worse, ‘Mrs FA' was still without a housemaid and was dreading the forthcoming visit of her parents. There was too much reason to fear that they would stay above a week. Jane’s back, she wrote in reply to Cassandra’s inquiry, had been almost free of pain for several days.

  ‘Sir Thomas Miller is dead. I treat you with a dead baronet in almost every letter,’ wrote Jane. Mrs Digweed was parting with both Hannah and her old cook, because Hannah refused to give up her lover, who was a man of bad character, and the cook was guilty only of being unequal to anything. Madame Perigord, formerly Henry’s housekeeper, wrote to Jane after returning from her native France that the country after the Battle of Waterloo was a scene of general poverty and misery with no money and no trade. Ben Lefroy’s brother Christopher-Edward had also been in France and was ‘thinking of the French as one would wish, disappointed in everything’.

  Jane complained that visitors left her little time for herself. She wanted a few days’ quiet. I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the house,’ she mused to Cassandra, amazed that fellow-writer Jane West managed to run a household, rear children and produce books. Composition seemed impossible to Jane Austen, with a head full of joints of mutton and rhubarb medicines: not garden rhubarb but an imported root from China and Tibet, used as a purgative. She enjoyed Charles’s visit after all.

  Edward spent three weeks at Chawton in November 1816; Henry was constantly coming and going; Charles had come home at the end of June. Mostly he stayed with the Palmer family in London to keep in close touch with the Admiralty but in November he came to Chawton, and because Edward had not succeeded in letting it, the Great House absorbed the overflow of relatives, children and servants. Something was wrong with Charles’s second girl, Harriet. It seemed she had water on the brain. Jane hoped Heaven in its mercy would soon take her.

  Persuasion was finished on 18 July 1816. Jane was dissatisfied with it. She was depressed, partly as a complication of her increasing illness, fearing her powers had left her. She felt the ending of the novel as it stood was tame and flat. One morning she woke feeling her gift had been restored to her, and rewrote the ending on 6 August. The title was discussed and the original plan was for it to be called The Elliots. It was probably given the title we have by Henry. A Mrs Barrett used to say ‘Anne Elliot was [Jane] herself; her enthusiasm for the navy and her perfect unselfishness reflect her completely.’

  24

  Winchester, 1817

  IN THE LAST year of her life Jane told Anna and James-Edward what happened to her characters after the novels in which they appeared ended, and other details of her plots. Miss Steele in Sense and Sensibility never did succeed in catching the doctor; Kitty Bennet in Pride and Prejudice married a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary had to make do with one of her Uncle Phillips’s clerks but was content to be a star in the society of Meryton; the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park claimed to have given William Price was only £1; Mr Woodhouse in Emma survived and prevented his daughter and Mr Knightley from moving to Don-well for two years; the letters Frank Churchill placed in front of Jane Fairfax, which she brushed away unread, spelt out the word ‘pardon’; Jane Fairfax lived for only ten years after marrying him.

  She told Cassandra that in the unfinished fragment, The Watsons, Mr Watson was going to die, and Emma Watson would become dependent for a home on her narrow-minded brother and sister-in-law. She was to decline an offer of marriage from Lord Osborne and the interest of the story was to arise from Lady Osborne’s love for Mr Howard and Mr Howard’s affection for Emma, who finally was to marry him.

  Jane was at work on something new when she died, the fragment to which the family gave the title Sanditon. The last page of the manuscript is dated 18 March 1817. Extracts were first published in James-Edward’s Memoir, It was first printed in full in 1925 and a facsimile was published in 1975 to mark the bicentenary of Jane’s birth.

  Brother James was also ailing in 1817 (he lived only till 1819, not long enough to claim his inheritance). James’s handsome son James-Edward delighted his aunts when he came to stay in January 1817. He was eighteen, tall and charming. The aunts loved him for his sweet temper and warm affection. Jane wrote to Caroline saying how much better she was feeling; she was looking forward to the summer when she hoped to be stronger. Her illness was in remission. She was convinced that her debility, nausea and vomiting were due to ‘bile’, and that she could treat herself. She sent news of her imaginary improvement to Alethea Bigg, the sister of Harris Bigg-Wither. Jane’s rejection of Alethea’s brother does not seem to have affected their friendship. Jane had been reading The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo by Robert Southey, published the previous year. She told Alethea she found the fond description of the poet’s dead son Herbert in the proem very beautiful. Henry, newly a clergyman, was expected at Chawton, and Jane had been marking his shirts for the laundry. The postscript to this letter is revealing:

  The real object of this letter is to ask y
ou for a receipt [recipe], but I thought it genteel not to let it appear early. We remember some excellent orange wine at Manydown, made from Seville oranges … and should be very much obliged to you…

  Anna was better in health than she had been since her marriage. She already had two children, one a toddler, the other a baby in arms, and was to have five more. Ben Lefroy had not yet been ordained, and Jane fretted that she wanted to see the family settled in a comfortable parsonage house. Jane and her mother could only see Anna when she came to Chawton, as Mrs Austen was seventy-five, Jane had rheumatism in her knee and the roads were too wet and muddy for the donkey-carriage. The donkeys were having so long a run of luxurious idleness that I suppose we shall find that they have forgotten much of their education when we use them again,’ said Jane. Ben and Anna walked over to hear her Uncle Henry preach. It had been a pleasure to see Anna, who looked so young and pretty, so blooming and innocent, that it was hard to believe she could ever have had a wicked thought in her head. Jane was remembering Anna’s naughtiness during her girlish days. Soon she was lamenting that Anna was probably pregnant again: she had a bad cold and 'we fear something else; she has just weaned Julia,' Jane told Anna’s cousin Fanny Knight, who was still single. 'Poor animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.’ Mrs Benn had had her thirteenth. 'I am quite tired of so many children,’ grumbled Jane, making her usual complaint.

  It was to Fanny whom Jane poured out her love and it was this niece who used her aunt as confidante in letter after letter. Fanny had finally chased away Mr Plumptre, who was now engaged to somebody else. Now she was wondering if young Mr Wildman, of Chilham Castle in Kent, might do. Chilham Castle was a fine Jacobean brick mansion, built by Sir Dudley Digges, Master of the Rolls to King James I, in front of an old Norman keep on a site with a pre-Roman history. The garden was the work of the famous Lancelot Capability’ Brown, who had created a lake to fill the bottom of the valley, with planned vistas. It was at Chilham that Jane had been amused to find she had become a sort of chaperone’. Fanny had tested Mr Wildman by lending him Jane’s novels without telling him who had written them. This was her way of checking him out for compatibility. Jane was enormously amused and the compliment doubtless pleased her. Presumably Mr Wildman failed the test, as Fanny married Sir Edward Knatchbull.

  Jane called Fanny inimitable, irresistible, the delight of her life. Fanny was worth her weight in gold, or even in the new silver coinage. Jane had felt pity, concern, admiration and amusement. What a loss Fanny’s intimacies would be when she married and her delicious play of mind was all settled down to conjugal and maternal affections. On the one hand, she did not want Fanny to get married, but on the other she did because she knew Fanny would never be happy until she was. She urged Fanny, in a letter of 20 February 1817, not to be unhappy over Mr Plumptre:

  Think of his principles, think of his father’s objection, of want of money, of a coarse mother, of brothers and sisters like horses, of sheets sewn across, etc.

  And the following month:

  By not beginning the business of mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in constitution, spirits, figure and countenance, while Mrs William Hammond is growing old by confinements and nursing.

  Jane Austen looked to marriage as productive of happiness for women, but marriage without too many children. As her sisters-in-law Anne Mathew, Elizabeth Bridges, Eliza de Feuillide and Frances Palmer were all dead, this was understandable. Jane promised Fanny that the right man would come at last, who would love her and whom she would love in return with deeper emotion than she had felt so far. Fanny looked at her spinster aunts and all their unmarried female friends and shivered. She was twenty-four and feared she was on the shelf.

  Jane was revising Persuasion: another book was almost ready for publication, Jane told Fanny. ‘You will not like it, so you need not be impatient,’ she teased. ‘You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.’

  Jane had been very poorly, with raised temperature and bad nights. She thought she had recovered her looks a little, which had been ‘black and white and every wrong colour’. Her disease caused mottled patches on her skin.

  Although retrospective diagnosis can never be certain, she is believed to have had either Hodgkin’s disease or more probably Addison’s disease, which in its later stages is grim. It is a wasting ailment of the adrenal glands, which are sited near the kidneys. The body produces antibodies to its own tissue. Symptoms are constant weakness and exhaustion, and a tendency to faint, combined with depression. Patients lose weight and their skin develops dark patches. People who saw Jane Austen late in her life noticed that her skin had a mottled appearance. Bowel movements become irregular and women cease to menstruate. Today the disease is treatable with steroid hormones.

  Despite her weakness Jane found time to write several letters to Caroline. (The name must have been correctly pronounced ‘Carolyn’, for Jane mocks an acquaintance for saying ‘Caroline.) In March Jane complained to Caroline of rheumatism and described herself as ‘but a poor honey at present’. The donkey was pressed into service but she was too weak to ride it more than once, Cassandra walking beside her. The animal drew the humble carriage which Jane used to get herself to Alton, where Frank was living, as Edward, now short of money himself, needed to let the Great House. Frank and his Mary now had six children aged between ten years and fifteen months.

  Jane was weaker. She had needed spectacles for some time, and her eyes tired easily. Unselfish to the last, the dying Jane Austen, dizzy because of low blood pressure, hardly able to eat because of nausea, her limbs aching, chose to lie on three chairs so that her mother could have the sofa. Jane insisted that this wretched arrangement was just as comfortable as the proper couch. Even when the sofa was empty, Jane refrained from using it in case her mother might feel inhibited about relaxing on it. Mrs Austen was seventy-seven and Jane had always considered her something of a hypochondriac. But although sceptical in her letters to Cassandra about Mrs Austen’s ailments Jane honoured her mother at severe cost to herself.

  In March James and Mary were sorting out the affairs of the recently deceased James Leigh-Perrot on behalf of his widow, and Caroline was sent to Chawton. Jane, however, was too ill for a visitor to be convenient so Caroline went to stay with her half-sister Anna instead at their rented red brick farmhouse within walking distance of Chawton. The day after Caroline’s arrival the nieces went to inquire after their Aunt Jane. She was not able to leave her bedroom but received them in her dressing gown, sitting in an armchair. She got up and greeted them affectionately. Pointing to seats by the fire, she said, ‘There’s a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline.’ Caroline was shocked to see how ill Jane was looking. There was a general appearance of debility and suffering that the little girl could not mistake. Jane was very pale and her voice, normally so pleasing, was weak and low. She was not strong enough to talk for more than about ten minutes and Cassandra soon took the girls away. Anna, living so near, was able to make a few more visits, but Caroline never saw her beloved Aunt Jane again. After Caroline was grown up, she felt that she had never loved or valued Jane enough.

  In April, Jane told Charles she had had a bilious attack and fever. She was now an invalid, living upstairs and being coddled. She had imagined herself to be better, but confessed that the shock of her uncle James Leigh-Perrot’s will had brought on a relapse. Mr Leigh-Perrot had left everything to his wife for her lifetime, with reversion to James and his heirs. Jane had been expecting something. Mrs Austen bore up better under the disappointment. Her belief was that her brother had expected to survive his wife and to make another will after her death. The bereaved Mrs Leigh-Perrot was wretched: unpleasant and selfish though she was, she sincerely loved and was loved by her husband. She told James-Edward how generous her husband had been to her and how anxious to make up to her for late deprivations’ in prison. ‘He was the whole world to me,’ she said. She added that when the Stoneleigh
settlement increased their income, horses and a new carriage had been bought but ill-health spoiled their enjoyment.

  That same month Jane made her own will, leaving everything to her sister, except £50 to Henry (who was still in debt after the collapse of his bank) and £50 to Madame Bigeon, who had suffered financially from Henry’s misfortune. Cassandra was her executrix.

  Meanwhile Edward Knight still had money worries as the lawsuit was dragging on. On 22 May Jane wrote to Anne Sharp, formerly governess to Edward’s daughters, in Doncaster. Jane wrote that she could now sit up in bed; her sister and brothers had been kindness itself. She was going to Winchester for treatment, with Cassandra, her indefatigable nurse. Jane described herself, attempting humour, as a very genteel, portable sort of invalid. In two days’ time she would be travelling the sixteen miles in James’s carriage to comfortable lodgings which had been taken for them. ‘Now that’s the kind ofthing which Mrs J Austen does in the kindest manner!’Jane acknowledged, but could not resist adding that her sister-in-law was not on the whole generously inclined. The fact that James was to inherit from the Leigh-Perrots after his aunt’s death was not calculated to soften her judgment of Mary’s character: it was too late in the day, Jane knew. The missing legacy still rankled with the dying Jane Austen. She cheered herself up with the thought that Mary might have to wait ten years before Mrs Leigh-Perrot was dead. Frank’s wife had another baby, with what Jane called a much shorter confinement than Jane’s own. Jane added significantly: