Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Did Jane decide that, after all, the delay had been too long, that the book couldn’t be read as she had meant it to be? A letter to her niece Fanny suggests that the manuscript came to profoundly dissatisfy her, certainly that she didn’t any longer consider it fit to be published as it stood: ‘Miss Catherine is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out.’ This letter can be dated, from the postmark, to March 1817. Jane was taken very ill in April and continued that way for five or six weeks. In May she moved to Winchester for medical treatment. By the middle of July she was dead. There’s not really much time for her to have revised the book. If ‘Miss Catherine’ is Northanger Abbey – and there’s no other obvious candidate – then the text that Jane was so dissatisfied with, the text that she’d decided to put back on the shelf, perhaps to leave there permanently, must be almost exactly, word-for-word, the text that we’re reading.

  When we open Northanger Abbey, when we leaf through its pages, we’re venturing somewhere that Jane wasn’t really willing to let us go.

  We’re trespassing.

  In a way it’s quite fitting. Catherine, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, is constantly making her way into places where she has no business being; pushing past a servant at a front door; opening chests and cabinets; sneaking into a bedroom she knows she isn’t meant to enter.

  Jane herself – like so many people at a time when families of ten children were common, and families of twenty not unheard of – didn’t ever have that much privacy.d But in her novels, bedrooms – unless they’re also sick rooms – are clearly considered private spaces. The rule even applies to guest rooms. While staying with her friend Charlotte in Kent, Lizzy Bennet retreats to the ‘solitude of her chamber’ to think, or to read letters from her sister. No one disturbs her there. When, in Sense and Sensibility, the Dashwood sisters are staying in London with the well-meaning but vulgar Mrs Jennings, Jane sees fit to remark that the lady of the house doesn’t always wait for her knock to be answered before coming into their room – it’s a breach, not of etiquette precisely, but of a more profound social rule. It’s viewed as invasive.

  And it’s seldom that we, as readers, are allowed into bedrooms – Jane takes us there far less often than the film and television adaptations would lead you to believe. Take Mansfield Park, for example; there are times when Sir Thomas Bertram’s interest in his niece Fanny Price drifts a little too far from the purely avuncular, but he never pursues her into her bedroom to berate her, as happens in the 1999 film version. Fanny’s cousin Edmund never sits on her bed to chat. She has a sitting room of her own. You’ll look in vain in Pride and Prejudice for the scene where Mrs Bennet, a heap of trembling lace propped up in bed, wails to her daughters and her brother about the runaway Lydia; we’re told specifically that she’s in her ‘dressing-room’.

  It can be difficult to recognise the taboos of your own culture until you’re somewhere that doesn’t observe them. There’s a taboo, in modern British culture at least, against going into the bedroom of a married couple, a taboo which becomes far stronger when neither half of that couple is a member of your blood family. I hadn’t appreciated quite how strong it was until a few years ago, when I was in India for a friend’s wedding. We were visiting her fiancé’s house, and were ushered up into his parents’ bedroom, where they were lying on the bed. They were fully dressed; there was a table of tea things. It’s a normal way to socialise, apparently, in middle-class Delhi circles. But I had to force myself over the threshold of their bedroom. It felt profoundly unnatural to me. And this taboo – or one very similar to it – also seems to be operating in Jane’s novels.

  Jane makes a particular point of not taking us into the bedrooms of married women. She ventures in there on only two occasions. One is the brief scene in Persuasion when the unconscious Louisa Musgrove is carried to the bed of Captain and Mrs Harville, which doesn’t really count, because Louisa is ill. The other occasion – the one which stands out – is in Northanger Abbey, when Catherine becomes obsessed with the idea of getting into the bedroom which belonged to the dead Mrs Tilney.

  In fact Northanger Abbey is very much the exception when it comes to bedrooms. In it Jane offers us no fewer than three bedroom scenes, all of them lengthy, and all of them featuring the heroine Catherine.

  In each scene we see Catherine working herself into a frenzy of excitement before opening or entering something. In one scene we’re invited to visualise her half-dressed, her clothes falling off her (‘having slipped one arm into her gown’). In another she’s in her nightie. The sexual element is unmistakable.

  Jane was a spinster, yes, but she wasn’t prudish. The birds and the bees weren’t a mystery to her. She grew up in the country, for one thing; in addition to his duties as a clergyman, and his tutoring, her father farmed. During her lifetime, her brothers produced 23 nieces and nephews for her. She often comments on pregnant women and childbirth in her letters. A sister-in-law ‘is to be confined in the middle of April’.4 A neighbour, a Mrs Warren, ‘has got rid of some part of her child, & danced away with great activity, looking by no means very large’.5 ‘Dame Tilbury’s daughter has lain in’, Jane tells Cassandra, noting a few lines later that another neighbour has been ‘brought to bed of a dead child’.6 She boasts about picking a scandalous woman out of a crowd – ‘I have a very good eye at an Adultress’.7 Her novels feature sex outside marriage, illegitimate children, adultery.

  But English culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries wasn’t all that prudish either. It was sexist and morally judgemental, absolutely, but in other respects it was far more relaxed about bodies than we are. You find adverts for nipple cream in early nineteenth-century newspapers.e I’ve never seen a commercial on television or in the national press for that kind of product. An advertisement for ‘Balm of Gilead’ – again, in a newspaper – has no hesitation in announcing that it ‘assists wonderfully in recovering the tone of the urinary and genital organs’. The advertisement refers openly to ‘bad lyings-in’, ‘immoderate courses of the menses’, ‘repeated and difficult labours’. The only moments of bashfulness come when discussing masturbation and sexually transmitted disease, and even then the euphemisms are pretty transparent – ‘those unhappy youths, who have been deluded at an early age into a secret and destructive vice’; ‘where the fountain is polluted, the streams that flow from it cannot be pure’.8

  There’s a matter-of-factness here about sex and its dangers, and about the physical toll that childbirth takes on the female body, an awareness, a respect, almost, that in some ways we’ve lost. It was generally accepted that pregnancy and giving birth weren’t unalloyed pleasures for women; in fact the eighteenth century saw quite a lot of research and development into surgical devices designed specifically to correct anal and vaginal prolapse. All of this perhaps goes some way towards explaining why, for the first two-thirds of Jane’s life, abortion was perfectly legal. Up until ‘quickening’, that is, when it becomes possible to feel foetal movement, which usually happens closer to five months’ gestation than four, women could take whatever measures they chose to restore their ‘natural courses’ – their periods. In fact, before the passing of The Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act (also known as Lord Ellenborough’s Act) in 1803, the law wasn’t altogether clear that even late abortion, after quickening, was a crime.f

  Throughout the eighteenth century ‘female pills’ were freely advertised and sold alongside toothpaste, cough mixture, and face cream. It was claimed that they would correct ‘blocked’ or ‘suppressed’ periods. The adverts often mention something called chlorosis, or green-sickness, an illness unique to women who were past puberty but still virgins, and which was thought to be caused by a blockage of menstrual blood. There was, then, a ‘genuine’ medical need for such products, unrelated to abortion. But it’s difficult to believe that suppliers didn’t intend to suggest that their pills could ‘correct’ an unwanted pregnancy as well. We know the composition of so
me of these pills, either from materia medica (chemists’ recipe books) or because adverts list the ingredients. Many contained recognised abortifacients – myrrh, aloes, senna, savin oil. They might not have worked, but they weren’t difficult to come by. Even after 1803 the advertisements continued unabated. You could purchase by mail-order, at chemists, at booksellers and – a point to bear in mind – in circulating libraries.g

  The culture Jane had grown up in didn’t require women to be always joyously accepting of pregnancy.

  Childbirth, after all, was dangerous. The figures are difficult to get to grips with, because cause of death was seldom recorded, and even where it was, accuracy can be an issue. Historians of the subject generally agree, though, that maternal mortality fell quite substantially between the mid-seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. The fall doesn’t coincide either with the move towards ‘man-midwives’ or the introduction of forceps. Of course, England was in the throes of a bloody civil war during the middle of the seventeenth century. There would have been an increase in levels of stress and in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, and a decrease in the quality of nutrition – all of which can affect pregnancy outcomes, often for more than one generation – so part of the fall may be a return to more ‘normal’ levels.

  But those levels are still, for us, unimaginably high.

  It’s estimated that during the Regency period, two women died for every hundred babies that were born, so a 1 in 50 risk. That compares to modern maternal death rates in the UK of about 1 in 12,000 live births, and of about 1 in 7,000 live births in the US, according to the most recent figures from the World Health Organization. Still, 1 in 50 doesn’t sound all that bad, does it, for the olden days? But these figures aren’t the lifetime risk for a woman. That is higher, and it depends – now, as then – on how many children she gives birth to: nowadays, in developed countries with access to contraception, rarely more than two or three, but during Jane’s lifetime perhaps as many as eight (as in her own family), or ten, or a dozen or more.

  Not every labour is dangerous, but having lots is. Even now, first labours are statistically riskier, with the risk then decreasing before rising again sharply on the rare occasions that pregnancies get towards double figures. Independently of the number of pregnancies a woman has had, she runs a greater risk the older she is. Very young women are also in greater danger. But the fact remains that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the lifetime risk of a woman dying while giving birth or from complications of labour was substantial. Post-partum haemorrhage, sepsis; they were very likely to kill you. And there were complications of pregnancy to be considered as well. Ectopic pregnancy was inevitably fatal. In 1855, the novelist Charlotte Brontë died from what was very probably hyperemesis – the violent, unrelenting nausea and vomiting which the current Duchess of Cambridge has suffered from in both her pregnancies. The only treatment for eclampsia was to deliver the baby (this remained the sole treatment until 1957). Caesarean section was very rarely used; surgeons weren’t skilled in it. In the pre-hygiene era, it amounted to a death sentence for the mother anyway.

  Almost every family had a tale of maternal death to tell, though of course they might not always have told it. One of Jane’s own grandmothers, Rebecca Austen, seems to have died giving birth. Class and wealth didn’t make much difference. At the end of 1817, Princess Charlotte, the second in line to the throne, laboured for two days to give birth to a still-born son, before dying herself.

  And even when childbirth didn’t prove fatal, even when there weren’t life-altering birth injuries, frequent and repeated pregnancies took a physical toll. This is very much the view that Jane expresses in her letters. Consoling her niece Fanny on a disappointed love affair, she points out that, ‘by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure & countenance, while Mrs Wm Hammond [one of Fanny’s friends] is growing old by confinements & nursing’. Later in the letter, she glumly informs Fanny that another niece, Anna, seems to be pregnant again; ‘Anna has had a bad cold, looks pale, & we fear something else. — She has just weaned Julia.’

  After Anna’s pregnancy had been confirmed, Jane wrote to Fanny again, a letter which fairly reverberates with rage about the endless child-bearing she saw all around her. ‘Poor Animal’, she says of Anna, ‘she will be worn out before she is thirty. — I am very sorry for her. — Mrs Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children. — Mrs Benn has a 13th —.’9

  This negative attitude towards pregnancy and childbirth, the sense of how relentless reproduction could be, isn’t really expressed in the novels. A number of Jane’s married female characters are childless – more than one would expect. The Crofts, in Persuasion, have no children, nor do the Allens in Northanger Abbey. Lady Russell, Mrs Smith, Mrs Norris – all were married for years and none, so far as we know, has ever had a child.

  With the possible exception of Mary Musgrove, in Persuasion, the characters who are mothers take pregnancy in their stride.h The two children to be born in the main action of the novels – and it is only two, since we don’t learn about one of the births in Sense and Sensibility until afterwards – make their appearance very unproblematically. Mrs Palmer is pregnant for most of Sense and Sensibility, giving birth about two-thirds of the way through; there’s no indication that anyone ever worries about her at all. In Emma, when the heroine’s friend and former governess Mrs Weston gives birth, we’re told that her ‘friends all rejoiced in her safety’, indicating an undercurrent of suppressed anxiety. But this is the only place in the text that anything approaching concern for her condition is mentioned – even by the health-obsessed Mr Woodhouse.

  True, in Mansfield Park, the heroine’s mother, married, we’re told, eleven years and already ‘preparing for her ninth lying-in’, is described – unsurprisingly – as ‘bewailing the circumstance’. The pregnancy is unwanted – surely resented. But the problem appears to be money. There is ‘such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost everything else’. Other large families in the novels – the Lucases in Pride and Prejudice; the Morlands in Northanger Abbey; the Musgroves in Persuasion – are generally pretty cheerful. The mothers, in each case, are hale and hearty.

  It’s odd. We know that this isn’t how Jane saw the matter, and that it isn’t an accurate representation of childbirth at the time. And it’s particularly odd in fiction. Novels of the period almost always made their heroes and heroines orphans, or apparently orphans. Tragic deaths in childbirth happened all the time in books.

  Jane even jokes about it, at the very beginning of Northanger Abbey, saying how ‘remarkable’ it is that her heroine’s mother should possess such a ‘good constitution’, how unexpected that, rather than dying having Catherine, Mrs Morland has ‘lived on to have six children more’ and ‘see them growing up around her’. It’s part of the fun Jane has in the opening chapters, skewering every novelistic convention she can think of.

  But when Jane re-read the novel in 1816 or 1817, with a view to possibly publishing, did she wince at this passage? In 1814, after all, her sister-in-law Frances died giving birth to a fourth child. Edward’s wife Elizabeth had given birth to ten children without turning a hair – just like Mrs Morland. In 1808, an eleventh child killed her.

  What is clear is that Jane was aware that, in the absence of any information to the contrary, her readers would assume that it was complications of labour which had killed characters of child-bearing age. She quite often makes a point of explaining that a death wasn’t related to childbirth. A ‘lingering illness’ does for one character. Anne Elliot’s mother, it appears, has also been ill for some time – she anticipates her own demise. Two characters die of consumption – or so we’re told: Jane Fairfax’s mother in Emma, and Colonel Brandon’s first love Eliza in Sense and Sensibility.i

  Just as we, hearing of the sudden death of a young or youngish woman, default to ideas of a car cr
ash or cancer, so Jane’s readers would guess at childbirth as a cause of death before anything else, for married women at least. So even if Jane herself had a less negative view of the risks of reproduction at the time she wrote Northanger Abbey, before her sisters-in-law started to die in childbed, she knew that for her readers the prospect of dying giving birth wasn’t distant. The real risk was substantial; the fear must have haunted every pregnant woman. It wouldn’t have been amusing – it was deathly serious.

  But most critics agree that Northanger Abbey shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It’s comic – ridiculous, light-hearted, Jane’s ‘funniest novel’.10 They all agree that Catherine’s view of the world, her expectations of what she’ll find at Northanger, are completely – and hilariously – warped by the Gothic novels she’s read.

  As we’ve seen, though, Jane surely hoped – she surely intended, when she wrote it – for her readers to find something different and altogether more complicated in the novel. Jane assumed, when she was writing the book, that her readers would know certain novels and plays, would read certain references into the text. This is what she’s talking about, in the advertisement. She expected, originally, readers who were familiar enough with Gothic novels to realise what’s passed nearly every modern reader by – the fact that Catherine Morland, probably the best-known Gothic novel reader in the world, reads only one Gothic novel, and doesn’t even seem to finish it.

  We’re told that the Gothic is a new sub-genre for Catherine, told, indeed, that she hasn’t read very many novels, certainly not as many as the other characters she encounters. ‘New books’, she explains, ‘do not fall in our way.’ The only ‘new book’ she does read, or begin to read, is The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe was the most famous Gothic novelist of the 1790s. She wrote six novels and a book of travel writing, and made quite a lot of money by doing so. She received £800 for one of her works, a considerable sum for the rights to a novel. The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, is Radcliffe’s fourth novel. It’s a big book – getting towards 700 pages in the modern Oxford World’s Classics edition, four volumes in the original. It’s set during the sixteenth century and tells the story of a French girl, Emily St Aubert, beautiful, virtuous, and unlucky. Her mother dies at the end of the first chapter, her father in Chapter 7. Taken in by an unfeeling aunt, she shortly acquires a new uncle in the form of the villainous Italian Montoni, and is carted off to Italy – first to Venice and then to the mysterious, crumbling Castle of Udolpho.