by Helena Kelly
Her own belongings are packed in haste, on the final evening. She leaves her writing box till the end – she need only empty out the powder pot and the inkwell, and make everything secure so that nothing will rattle about on the journey. She needn’t read the letter again – but still she cannot help herself. If only—! But she does not have £10, nor is she likely to, and even if she did, how is such a thing to be managed, without the aid of one of her brothers, drafts on banks, men of business? No. It is not to be thought of any more.
She scrabbles under the bed for the tin trunk and flings its contents on to the bed in brisk handfuls. She had meant only to bury Susan and Mr Crosby’s letter at the bottom, under the bundles of paper she has so foolishly treasured all these years, but here too are her notebooks, gifts from long ago, and, reading through them, she grows tender. Here are the absurd plays she wrote, and her tales of legs broken in mantraps and drunkenness and sudden, surprising marriages. A heroine who steals ices from a pastry-cook’s shop – how gloriously wicked she and Cassandra had thought it! And Love and Freindship, too – she never was a great hand at spelling – the story which made her father cry with laughter. Her History of England, by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian; Cassandra’s pictures of all the kings and queens. Her hand brushes against the story about the clergyman’s daughters which she had started but could never finish. Here are other infant novels, begun and abandoned. And some completed, more or less. Wicked Lady Susan is too short, not even a volume. She has never been quite happy with the beginning of Elinor and Marianne. First Impressions, too. Her father had thought a great deal of her stories, had even written to a publisher about one, though he met with a flat refusal. The whole of her life is here, in ink and paper. She cannot but treasure it.
Little Mary-Jane won’t remember the house in Castle Square at all, won’t take any memories away.
Jane travels with hers, the tin trunk solid under her feet as they jolt through the streets of Southampton, northwards, towards the common, parallel with the river. She will miss the river, and the sea. She will miss the flowers. By the time the cottage at Chawton is ready for them it will be too late to plant any.
Jane stares out at the pale early morning; the day becoming by degrees brighter, too bright, showing her that the sleeve of her black velvet pelisse is growing sadly rubbed. They will pass through Winchester first, with its ancient cathedral, then on to Alton. Alton to Farnham, Farnham to Bagshot, through Staines, past the charming little villas about Richmond, and so on, to Brentford, and to London. To London, and a night at brother Henry’s house. Eliza and the latest fashions await them there, an evening being plied with coffee and plum cake and scandal before they travel on to Godmersham. Jane can imagine it already – her sister-in-law moving by delicate, insinuating degrees on to family matters.
What luck, Eliza will say, that Edward felt able to promote the scheme of moving to Chawton! And at such a time! How good he is, how truly generous. Have they seen the house? Has it a pleasant aspect? Will they have agreeable neighbours? And Cassandra, with a reproving frown, will reply that Edward is very kind to them.
Cassandra always says what ought to be said, but Jane has very little opinion of Edward’s kindness herself. Edward is not the eldest nor the cleverest nor the bravest of her brothers, no, nor the kindest either. He is only the richest. But Edward is bereft, Edward is grieving – this is no time to be thinking about the four years that have passed since their father died, no time for the resentful voice which whispers that a truly generous man would have welcomed his mother and sisters into his own home, either of his homes, rather than housing them in the cottage where his estate manager used to live. Jane sets herself to thinking about the children, about her niece Fanny, and to wondering whether perhaps it had been harder for Edward than she had supposed, to be separated from his family when he was so young – no older than Fanny is now – whether she might love him better if he felt more like a real brother, and she felt less like a poor relation.
The sound of the wheels, the jingling of the harnesses, lull her into restless sleep; thoughts rattle against each other, pictures bloom. Godmersham, Edward’s Kentish estate. Sorbet and French wine; chocolate and white rolls for breakfast; the park, walks in the woodland. ‘Run mad as often as you chuse …’
Another home left behind; sisters, poor while their brother is rich; a young woman running, tumbling on a hillside; a handsome gentleman with an ugly character; fine houses and cottages; journeys; city streets, London bustle. Sensibility fighting sense. Love and loss, greed and gain.
So long, so long since they have spoken to her, but she thinks – she is almost sure – that the young girl running on the hillside is someone that she knows. An impulsive girl, passionate, grieving for the loss of a father. And a sister, quieter, more serious – rational, controlled, sensible.
Jane’s fingers, resting in her lap, twitch. She opens her eyes.
We’re all going to be seeing a lot more of Jane Austen. 2017 is the bicentenary of her tragically early death at the age of 41. And by way of celebration, the Bank of England is introducing a new £10 note with her face on.
Actually, it’s not her face. It’s an idealised picture commissioned for a family memoir published 50 years after she died. She looks richer, prettier, and far less grumpy than she does in the amateurish, unfinished sketch it’s based on. And there are some other problems with the design for the note.
In the background there’s going to be a picture of a big house – Godmersham, where Jane didn’t live. Also featured will be an illustration of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet reading some letters and a quotation from the same novel: ‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!’ – a line spoken by a character who shortly afterwards yawns and throws her book aside.
The biggest problem, though, it seems to me, is that for most people that’s Jane Austen. That’s what they recognise – pretty young women, big houses, Pride and Prejudice – demure dramas in drawing rooms. Seeing it on a banknote half a dozen times a week is only going to embed it further.
Jane was born five years after the poet William Wordsworth, the year before the American Revolution began. When the French Revolution started, she was thirteen. For almost all of her life, Britain was at war. Two of her brothers were in the navy; one joined the militia. For several years she lived in Southampton, a major naval base. It was a time of clashing armies, and warring ideas, a time of censorship and state surveillance. Enclosures were remaking the landscape; European empire-building was changing the world; science and technology were opening up a whole universe of new possibilities.
We’re perfectly willing to accept that writers like Wordsworth were fully engaged with everything that was happening, and to find the references in their work, even when they’re veiled or allusive. But we haven’t been willing to do it with Jane’s work. We know Jane – we know that however delicate her touch, she’s essentially writing variations of the same plot, a plot that wouldn’t be out of place in any romantic comedy of the last two centuries.
We know wrong.
The indisputable facts of Jane Austen’s life are few and simple. She was born in the small Hampshire village of Steventon, on 16th December 1775, the seventh of a clergyman’s eight children. Apart from five years spent in Bath between 1801 and 1806 and three years in Southampton, a few months at school, and occasional visits and holidays, she spent all her life in rural Hampshire. She never married. She died in Winchester on 18th July 1817, aged 41, and was buried in Winchester cathedral. In the four years between the end of 1811 and the end of 1815 she published four novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Another two novels – Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – were published right at the end of 1817, the year she died.a
Two hundred years on, her work is astonishingly popular. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist who could be compared to her. Yet Jane herself remains a shadowy, curiously colourless figur
e; one who seems to have spent the majority of her 41 years being dragged along in the wake of other people’s lives.
But what lives the people around Jane had – her father, orphaned in early childhood, who worked his way out of poverty; her mother, who could claim kinship with a duke but found herself making ends meet in a country vicarage; her aunt Philadelphia, who, with no prospects in England, travelled out to India to find herself a husband; Philadelphia’s daughter, Eliza, who lost her French spouse to the guillotine. The eldest of Jane’s brothers, James, was raised in the expectation of succeeding to the property owned by his maternal uncle; her second brother George seems to have suffered from some form of disability and lived apart from the rest of the family; her third brother, Edward, was adopted into a life of luxury; Henry, the fourth of the Austen brothers, bounced from career to career – first a soldier in the militia, like that scoundrel George Wickham, then a banker, and then, finally, after his bank went bust, a clergyman. The two youngest brothers, Frank and Charles, born either side of Jane, went into the navy and led lives full of excitement and danger. Even Jane’s only sister, Cassandra, had an engagement to her name, a story of her own.
We know what most of these people looked like, we know about their careers, their marriages, their children. We know that one of Jane’s aunts was accused of stealing lace from a shop in Bath, and that one of her cousins died in a carriage accident. We know that her sister’s fiancé died of yellow fever, and that her great-great-uncle was the Duke of Chandos. All of Jane’s modern biographers repeat these facts, just as they reproduce the portraits of her brothers and her aunts and her cousin and the men who may (or, more probably, may not) have wanted to marry her, and the confused, contradictory opinions of people who barely knew her, in the belief that somehow, by combining together every scrap, something will take shape – an outline, a silhouette, a Jane-shaped space. But in spite of all their efforts, Jane remains only a slight figure vanishing into the background, her face turned away – as it is in the only finished portrait we have of her.
The more determined our pursuit, the more elusive Jane becomes. Where should we look for her? Will we find her in modern-day Bath, in the rain-drenched gold-stone buildings that are now flats or dental surgeries, in the park which occupies the place where the Lower Assembly Rooms once stood, or at the Upper Rooms, which were rebuilt almost entirely after fire damage in the Second World War? Will we find her in the Jane Austen House Museum at Chawton? She did live there, for eight years, and her sister Cassandra for nearly 40. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was divided into separate dwellings; a century later it was turned back into one. Dozens of people have lived there. And if any trace of Jane remains, then the thousands of tourists who trudge through the rooms each year will have driven it away. Visitors are shown a piano ‘like’ Jane’s; a modern reproduction of a bed ‘like’ the one Jane had when she was twenty; a table at which Jane ‘may have’ written; the caps that Jane’s nieces and nephews wore as babies. The museum’s proudest boast is Jane’s jewellery – a topaz cross, a bead bracelet, a ring set with a blue stone. These are displayed in a narrow room off the largest bedroom, sitting dumbly in their glass cases, carefully lit but offering no sense of the woman who once wore them.
The rectory at Steventon – the house Jane lived in until she was 25 – is long gone. The church it served survives. It’s left open, with a plaque on the wall and flowers, continually replaced, to reassure the pilgrims who make it this far that they really have come to the right place. It’s almost possible, closing the church door, brushing past the ancient yew tree, to catch a glimpse of a little girl running ahead of you – but, like all ghosts, this is only a trick of the mind.
We have to look for Jane elsewhere.
In the spring of 1809 the 33-year-old Jane Austen was living, not in the countryside, nor in Bath, but in Southampton, in a house rented by her sea captain brother Francis, usually known as Frank. Southampton is less than twenty miles along the south coast from Portsmouth, where the Price family lives in Mansfield Park. A guide book of the period describes Southampton as ‘handsomely built’ and ‘pleasantly situated’, with views ‘to the water, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight’. It mentions with approval that the streets are ‘well paved and flagged’ – a reminder that this was by no means a given for all town centres at this point. What the guide book glosses over is the fact that Southampton was also a naval dockyard. It was heavily fortified and, during the time that Jane was living there, towards the end of the long war with France which dominated her adult life, it was a major port of embarkation for soldiers going to fight Napoleon’s armies in Spain and Portugal.
If we associate Jane with an urban space, it’s likely to be genteel Bath, not a dock town filled with public drunkenness, street prostitution, and violence. In addition to press-ganging – the state-sanctioned abduction scheme by which the Royal Navy ensured it had enough men to sail its ships – both the army and the navy welcomed into their ranks men who would otherwise have been in prison. Fighting men were, by and large, rough men and Southampton can’t have been an altogether pleasant place for a household of women who were usually without a gentleman to protect them. Jane seems to have enjoyed some aspects of her time in Southampton well enough, however. She talks in her letters about walking on the ramparts, and rowing on the River Itchen with her nephews. But – so far as we know – it seems to have been the prospect of leaving Southampton and moving back to the country which reignited Jane’s interest in getting her work published.
For some few years before she moved to Southampton at the end of 1806, Jane’s life had been unsettled. You’ll usually read that Jane lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806, but in fact she was almost continually on the move, and the city was more a base than a home. Together with her sister Cassandra, their mother, and (until his sudden death at the beginning of 1805) their father, she lodged in various parts of Bath – in Sydney Place, Green Park Buildings, Gay Street, and Trim Street – making lengthy visits to family, and for months at a time removing to seaside resorts, among them Dawlish, Sidmouth, Ramsgate (where Wickham trifles with Georgiana Darcy in Pride and Prejudice) and Lyme Regis (the setting for some of the pivotal scenes in Persuasion). You may also come across the claim that Jane didn’t take much interest in her writing while she lived in Bath, but that’s not the case. It was during this period, in the spring of 1803, that she first had a novel accepted for publication.
That novel was Susan, almost certainly a version of the book we know as Northanger Abbey.b We know, too, that Jane had written at least one other full-length novel before she moved to Bath – a book she called First Impressions. This may have been an earlier version of Pride and Prejudice, and it may or may not be the same book her father offered, unsuccessfully, to the publisher Cadell in 1797. We have a fragment – the beginning of a novel – about a clergyman’s numerous family, which is usually known as The Watsons, written on some 1803-watermarked paper. A neat copy of Lady Susan, a short novella in letters, is written out on paper which bears an 1805 watermark, although it seems probable from the immature style that it was composed earlier. Between 1803 and the spring of 1809, however, we can be certain about virtually nothing connected with Jane’s writing, other than that she wrote one poem in December 1808, on her 33rd birthday – a memorial poem to a friend who’d died in a riding accident exactly four years earlier. Maybe she stopped writing prose altogether. Maybe she was working on pre-existing drafts, or on pieces which were later incorporated into the other novels. Maybe she was writing something she later destroyed. We simply don’t know.
We do have a list of composition dates for Jane’s novels, but it was written by Cassandra, not Jane, and we have no idea when it was drawn up. Writers on Jane have tended to treat this document as if it were completely reliable; they really shouldn’t.
One thing we do know for sure is that in April 1809, only a week or two before Jane was due to leave Southampton for a lengthy visit to her brother Edw
ard at Godmersham, she wrote to the publishing firm which had bought Susan. We have a draft of Jane’s letter, written on a sheet of paper that had originally served as an envelope, with the words ‘Miss Austen’ written on the other side. Jane wrote in pencil initially, inking over the words afterwards, when she also changed the signature from ‘J. Austen’ to ‘M.A.D.’ We have Crosby’s disobligingly businesslike reply, crammed with quasi-legal terms (‘full consideration’, ‘stamped receipt’, ‘stipulated’, ‘bound’), offering to sell her Susan for £10, and threatening that he will ‘take proceedings’ to stop the novel being published anywhere else.
But what effect this letter had on Jane is unclear. We don’t find another reference to Susan/Northanger Abbey until 1817 and – as we’ll see in the next chapter – she continued to view the book very negatively. But she soon had other projects in hand.
Sense and Sensibility was the first of Jane’s novels to make it all the way through the publication process. It appeared in October 1811, and must have been completed some time before the end of 1810, as by April 1811 Jane was busy correcting the proofs. Later in her career, when she had a regular publisher, Jane worked on the assumption that a year would intervene between her finishing a novel and that novel appearing. The gap between Jane finishing writing Sense and Sensibility and copies being put on sale may well have been longer.