by Helena Kelly
Before Jane could think about sending a novel off, she would have had to copy it out by hand, which would have taken a number of weeks, perhaps a couple of months. Then she had to send the package off, wait for the publisher to read the novel, respond, and negotiate terms. Jane may already have been working on Sense and Sensibility before she wrote to Crosby to enquire about Susan.
In the summer of 1809 Jane’s writing is full of an unaccustomed exuberance, very similar to the bubbling enthusiasm that appears in her letters of 1813 when she receives Pride and Prejudice from the printers. Frank’s wife Mary had given birth to a boy in the second week of July, and a fortnight later Jane sent her brother a rather lovely piece of writing which can only properly be described as a letter-poem; part congratulation, part affectionate remembrance of their childhood, and part description of her happiness in the house at Chawton. She addresses him warmly as ‘My dearest Frank’, and expresses the wish that the baby will resemble his father even in his faults – the ‘insolence of spirit’, and ‘saucy words & fiery ways’ which the grown-up Frank had worked so hard to correct. ‘Ourselves’, she assures him, ‘are very well’, and ‘Cassandra’s pen’ will explain in ‘unaffected prose’ how much they like their ‘Chawton home—’
—how much we find
Already in it to our mind,
And how convinced that when complete,
It will all other Houses beat,
That ever have been made or mended,
With rooms concise or rooms distended.
The poem also offers the rarest of insights into the Austen family nursery, in a charming image of Frank as a naughty little boy with ‘curley Locks’ poking his head around a door and assuring someone named ‘Bet’ that ‘me be not come to bide’. There’s an eagerness and a warmth here which is rare in Jane’s other letters to her family, an easy flow to her words which is very different to the rather stiff and formal mourning poem she had written six months earlier, in remembrance of her friend. It’s tempting to conclude that something had shifted, that she had started to write again.
Too tempting, perhaps. We don’t know what Jane was thinking in the spring and summer of 1809. Having waited for six long years, why write to Crosby then, when she was just about to move? Why the punning initials of the pen name? Why not simply change a few details and publish the novel elsewhere, without alerting him? Why not enlist the help of her brother Henry, who had presumably been involved in selling the manuscript in the first place?
We know so little about Jane’s life, and that little is so difficult to interpret accurately, that we can’t afford to dismiss what’s revealed in her fiction. At least it speaks, and at least it was written by her. As for the rest, there are so many gaps, so many silences, so much that has been left vague, or imprecise, or reported at second or third hand, that the task of filling everything in is very far from being the ‘short and easy’ one that her brother Henry – the first of her many biographers – claimed in his Biographical Notice of the Author.
Of course, if Henry is to be believed, Jane barely thought at all.
On Henry’s telling, his sister’s books sprang into life fully-formed – painlessly, effortlessly. According to him, Jane’s composition was ‘rapid and correct’, a flow of words which ‘cost her nothing’, washing through her to appear, as everything she wrote appeared, ‘finished from her pen’. We are to imagine no labour, no dedication, no ambition, no intellect or skill, but simply a ‘gift’, a ‘genius’, an ‘intuitive’ power of invention. For modern-day readers, schooled on the image of Jane’s near-contemporary, the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, hopped up on vast quantities of opium, writing down his famous poem of Xanadu and Kubla Khan while still in an inspired dream, this is an attractive idea. It allows us to imagine Jane’s novels, not as pieces of deliberate, considered art, but instead as whatever we like – a wrestling with her own repressed desires, a rewriting of her own unhappy love affairs, even an accidental tapping into a wellspring of culture and language. Jane’s novels have been read in all these ways, and others besides.
The problem with any of these imaginings is that what Henry said was wrong. We don’t have very many of Jane’s manuscripts, but enough exist to tell us that she worked at her writing. The draft fragment we know as The Watsons is dotted with crossings-out, additions, and alterations. We even have an earlier attempt at an ending to Persuasion which Jane was dissatisfied with, and rewrote. You can see her, choosing one word over another, checking that the sentence balances, that she’s picked the right phrase, and put it in the right place.
Henry’s Biographical Notice of the Author appeared in the first, joint edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which was hurried through the print presses a scant five months after Jane died. The Notice is short, but crammed with what might politely be called inconsistencies. Having assured his readers that Jane’s novels appeared almost without effort, Henry includes in a postscript Jane’s own famous description of her work as akin to miniature painting – a ‘little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. In the Notice, Henry says that Jane never thought of having a book published before Sense and Sensibility – even though he was well aware that Susan/Northanger Abbey had been accepted for publication in 1803. He claims that Jane never ‘trusted herself to comment with unkindness’, when it’s obvious to even the most uncritical of readers that Persuasion contains one exceptionally vicious passage, in which the feelings of a bereaved mother are mocked as ‘large fat sighings’ simply because the character happens to be ‘of a comfortable substantial size’.
A charitable assessment of Henry’s comments, noting that he must have begun his biography very soon after Jane died, might call these errors or misreadings, and attribute them to grief. It might be right to do so, if it weren’t for the fact that Henry sets out to create an entirely false image of his sister. He does all he can to convince his readers that Jane wasn’t a proper author, and never considered herself one. She had, he says, very little opinion of her work, and no thought of obtaining an audience. He tells his readers that, having at last yielded to the persuasions of her family and sent Sense and Sensibility to a publisher, she was ‘astonished’ at its success. This Jane could never have been persuaded to put her name to her novels; indeed, Henry insinuates, they should not be considered as solely her work, since she was ‘thankful for praise, open to remark, and submissive to criticism’ from her family.
Henry, in short, was lying, and his lies were deliberate ones. In part his aim was to protect himself and his siblings from the damaging idea that their sister may have wanted – or even needed – to write for money. He insists that ‘neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives’. In his world, gentlewomen didn’t work and would never have dreamed of looking for public acclaim. We should bear in mind, too, the context of Henry’s remarks – a ‘biographical notice’ intended to help the sale of two novels, neither of which Jane herself had seen fit to have published.
But then again, his motives may have been fundamentally sound enough. He would have known how very unsympathetically female authors were treated. As a writer called Mary Hays explained in 1801, ‘the penalties and discouragements attending the profession of an author fall upon women with a double weight’. They are, she continued, tried in the court of public opinion, ‘not merely as writers, but as women, their characters, their conduct’ searched into, while ‘malignant ingenuity’ is ‘active and unwearied’ in finding out ‘their errors and exposing their foibles’.
The reputation of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft had been dragged through the mud after her death in 1797. Rumours circulated that Ann Radcliffe, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho – Catherine Morland’s favourite novel in Northanger Abbey – had gone insane. Charlotte Smith, whose writing Jane read and enjoyed, anticipated that some people would find the ‘political remarks’ in her 1792 novel Desmond ‘displeasing’. A
nd she was right: her forthright defence of the principles of the French Revolution saw the novel rejected by her usual publishers and, we are told, ‘lost her some friends’. Even Maria Edgeworth, the most successful novelist of the period, was forced to rewrite her 1801 novel Belinda in order to remove a marriage which critics thought ‘disgusting’ and morally dangerous because one character was white and the other black.
We have to remember, too, that the Austen family lived in a country in which any criticism of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous. Britain and France were at war from 1793 to 1815, with only two brief pauses – in 1802–3, and from summer 1814 to February 1815, when Napoleon was temporarily confined on the island of Elba. From 1812 to 1815, Britain was also at war with America, the colony it had lost in 1776, the year after Jane Austen was born. Revolutionary ideas had travelled from America to France, but the infection had its roots in England, in particular in the writing of Thomas Paine, who’d left his native Norfolk to spread his radical ideas across the globe. In 1792 Paine was convicted in his absence of seditious libel – essentially, of writing down ideas dangerous to the state – but he continued to write, if anything more dangerously than before, questioning the very notion of private property, of organised religion, even.
Saddled with a monarch who was periodically insane, and an heir to the throne who was not only dissolute and expensive to run but had also illegally married a Catholic widow, the British state was under an enormous strain even before the war with France began. The war, for many years, went badly for Britain. French armies marched through Europe, French ships menaced Britain’s trade; the fear of invasion was constant. People who criticised the behaviour of the royal family, or complained about corrupt parliamentary elections; who turned away from the Church of England or asked whether those in power should really keep it, were perceived as betraying their country in her hour of need. To question one aspect of the way society worked was to attempt to undermine the whole.
Throughout Jane’s late teens and twenties the government built coastal batteries and forts to defend Britain against invasion from France, and it brought in a number of measures designed to protect the country against the spread of danger from within. In the process, Britain began to look more and more like a totalitarian state, with the unpleasant habits that totalitarian states acquire. Habeas corpus – the centuries-old requirement that any detention had to be publicly justified – was suspended. Treason was redefined. It was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill; it included thinking, writing, printing, reading. Prosecutions were directed not just against avowedly political figures, such as Paine, the radical politician Horne Tooke, or the theologian Gilbert Wakefield, but against their publishers. A schoolmaster was convicted for distributing leaflets. A man was prosecuted for putting up posters. The proprietors of the newspaper The Morning Chronicle were brought into court. Booksellers were threatened. Words were dangerous – reciting a piece of doggerel saw one Hampshire carpenter imprisoned for three years. There can hardly have been a thinking person in Britain who didn’t understand what was intended – to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves.
In a letter of 1795 the well-connected Whig politician Charles James Fox pondered ‘how any prudent tradesman can venture to publish anything that can in any way be disagreeable to the ministers’. William Wordsworth’s brother Richard urged him to ‘be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions’, warning him that ‘the ministers have great powers’. It was expected that letters would be opened and read by the authorities; it was accepted that publishers would shy away from anything which challenged or questioned societal norms too openly. Conservative writers flourished. The response from writers of a less reactionary frame of mind was to turn to nature and emotion – as the Romantic poets did – or to the relative safety of the past or foreign settings. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, is often described as the first historical novel, but in fact dozens were published in the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century. Almost every Gothic novel is set in the past, usually in the 1400s or 1500s. Writers were wary of writing about the present, and they were right to be. This is the atmosphere that Henry – and Jane – had lived through; this is the context in which Jane Austen wrote.
Of course, Henry’s insistence that Jane shouldn’t be considered an author, that she hardly intended to publish her work, that she bowed to the superior knowledge of her family – of her brothers, pillars of the establishment, clergymen, naval officers, a landowner – might make us think that he was protesting quite a lot too much. Why, after all, would he be so anxious to assure Jane’s readers that she was ‘thoroughly religious and devout’ and that her opinions ‘accorded strictly with those of our Established Church’, unless he knew that her novels could easily be read as being critical of the Church of England?
Think of Jane’s landowners, of her soldiers, her clergymen, her aristocrats. In Sense and Sensibility John Dashwood feels that generosity to his impoverished sisters would demean him; in Mansfield Park Henry Crawford elopes with a married woman, the cousin of the very woman he has proposed marriage to. In Pride and Prejudice, the militia officers spend their time socialising, flirting, and – on one occasion – cross-dressing, rather than defending the realm. The Reverend Mr Collins is laughable. None of Jane’s clergymen characters has a vocation, or even seems to care very much about the well-being – spiritual or physical – of their parishioners.c Does Lady Catherine de Bourgh look like a character designed to justify the aristocracy? Or Persuasion’s vain and wasteful Sir Walter Elliot?
Think, too, about the fact that Jane was the only novelist of this period to write novels which were set more or less in the present day, and more or less in the real world – or at any rate a world recognisable to her readers as the one in which they actually lived. Jane doesn’t offer us wicked villains and perfect heroines. She doesn’t give us storms, or miraculously reappearing heirs. She invents villages and towns (Meryton, Highbury), but locates them within the known landscape – Highbury is in Surrey, exactly sixteen miles from London. Often she has her characters walk along real streets in real places. In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe saunter together through the streets of Bath. You can follow in their footsteps even now. It’s still possible to stand on the harbour wall at Lyme and see where Louisa Musgrove fell in Persuasion.
Critics of Jane’s own generation praised her for her unparalleled ability to accurately reproduce what she saw around her. ‘Her merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation’, pronounced Richard Whateley, the Archbishop of Dublin in 1821, in a lengthy review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. For Whateley, what made Jane great was her ‘accurate and unexaggerated delineation of events and characters’. He was the first to suggest that she was as great as Shakespeare, repeatedly comparing the two. Robert Southey, friend to William Wordsworth, brother-in-law to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and one-time revolutionary, was by this point snug in the bosom of the establishment as Poet Laureate, the official poet to royalty. In future years he would strongly discourage Charlotte Brontë from writing, but he admired Jane’s novels and thought them ‘more true to nature … than any other of this age’. The American writer Henry Longfellow admitted that Jane’s writings were ‘a capital picture of real life’, but complained that ‘she explains and fills out too much’. In 1830 an unsigned essay in the Edinburgh Review called Jane ‘too natural’. There was clearly an agreement that Jane’s novels were realistic, and it was this which made them unique.
With a shift of generation, though, readers began to struggle a little more. Serious literary critics such as Thomas Macaulay and George Henry Lewes (both born the year Jane died) repeated and strengthened the comparison to Shakespeare, a comparison which concentrated on Jane’s depiction of character to the exclusion of anything else in her novels, and consigned her, not unlike Shakespeare, to the status of genius – inexplicable
, mysterious, timeless. Popular opinion echoed, obediently. An early American textbook on literature, published in 1849, claimed that Jane’s novels ‘may be considered as models of perfection’. An article in an English magazine series on ‘Female Novelists’ which appeared in 1852 asserted that Jane was the ‘perfect mistress of all she touches’.
Few mid-Victorian readers questioned Jane’s greatness but often they seemed bemused by her writing. They wondered why Jane should have chosen to depict a society ‘which … presents the fewest salient points of interest and singularity to the novelist’. Charlotte Brontë admitted to finding Jane’s novels unengaging, though she thought it was probably ‘heresy’ to criticise. ‘Miss Austen’, she announced in a letter to a literary correspondent in 1850, is ‘a rather insensible woman’. She may do ‘her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well’, but she ‘ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her’.
But Charlotte had such a very definite idea of what Jane’s writing consists of that, finding it confirmed in the one novel, Emma, which she’s discussing in this letter, she didn’t think it necessary to consider anything else that Jane might have written. As the century went on, increasingly readers appeared to pay more attention to what they already ‘knew’ about Jane’s novels – that is, to what was already said about them – than to the texts themselves. Increasingly, too, there was a hunger not for novels, but for novelists.
Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, and a biography of her appeared two years later. G.H. Lewes, writing about Jane in 1859, complained that so little was known of Jane’s life in comparison to Charlotte’s. He was, he said, baffled at the spectacle of ‘a fine artist whose works are widely known and enjoyed, being all but unknown to the English public, and quite unknown abroad’. This isn’t quite true. In 1852 an American fan – the daughter of a former President of Harvard University, no less – had written to Jane’s brother Frank, begging for a letter or even a sample of Jane’s handwriting. What was still true, though, was that nothing more was known of Jane’s life than what Henry had written in 1817.