by Helena Kelly
j Incidentally, since it’s February and term-time, they’re breaking the University of Oxford’s strict residence requirements.
k One of the granddaughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine was named Blanche.
l In a French edition of the novel from 1803.
CHAPTER 3
The Age of Brass
Sense and Sensibility
Steventon, January 1801.a
Jane, standing just inside the church porch, looks out on a gloomy prospect. The bare branches of the trees, the low cloud, the rain, sharp and freezing, like tiny pins run in under the skin. The yew tree close by the door drips, and against its dark needles the red berries glow.
That’s a baleful tree, young Jenny, that is. Bide here by me, little maid, and never touch it.
Later, when she was a little older, and had come to think it a silly country superstition, she had laughed, superior. But it was true enough. Her father had said so, had found the passage in – Caesar? Tacitus? – and translated it for her, word for word, as she leaned against his shoulder. A long summer evening, long ago.
The tenor of the rain changes, it becomes sleet, hail, drumming down on the roof, jumping and bouncing on the grass. The weather has set in, for the present. She places her basket on the floor and, bending down, works at the fastenings of her pattens. They are caked in mud. Her ankles ache from the effort of staying upright, of sliding and slithering along the lanes. Madness to go out in such weather. She wipes her feet, very thoroughly, and then lifts the latch and slips into the church. It had seemed so large when she was a little girl. How many times has she done this? A thousand, three thousand? There are not many times left to her.
Scarcely a day passes without visitors coming to the house, now that everyone in the neighbourhood knows they are to leave it. And each visitor has a cousin or an uncle or an acquaintance, who got quite stout at Bath, though the medical men had despaired of them entirely, who found the waters of no benefit at all, and preferred Harrogate or the Hot-Wells at Bristol, who married a post-captain with a fortune in prize-money and now live in a great way in London.
This morning James’s wife arrived with a party of friends. Mary looks on the house as quite her own, already, it appears. The house and every stick of furniture in it. No, Jane was quite forgetting. They are to take the beds with them to Bath. But the tables, the sideboards, the chests of drawers, the pictures, her piano, the books—
Naturally – naturally – they cannot take all the furniture with them. Of course they cannot. She realises that. And who is she to disagree, if her father and her mother approve the plan? Only it seems hard, when James is set to inherit from their uncle, that he should be given all this as well.
And so sudden a decision, too, for her parents to throw off everything they have known for 40 years as if it has become, all at once, a burden too great for them to bear, as if they cannot be rid of it – the farms, the bailiffs, the house and everything in it, this church – too quickly for their liking.
Jane, walking slowly up the aisle, has arrived in front of the altar. She turns, and traces a stone in the floor with the toe of one boot. Jane Leigh. Her grandmother, dead before she was born. Jane’s own mother has hardly ever spoken of her.
It is the way of the world, is it not? Women hardly matter. They pass from one family to another, and are never truly part of either.
The rain has ceased. She ought to go back. She cannot stay here.
Jane never knew any of her grandparents. They all died before she was born. Her father was an orphan by the time he was seven. Cast out of their home by a wicked stepmother, he and his sisters were thrown on the charity of aunts and uncles. Thomas Leigh – Jane’s mother’s father – was a clergyman and fellow of All Souls College Oxford. He died shortly before Jane’s parents got married; the timing suggests, indeed, that he may have opposed the relationship.
The only grandparent whose life really came close to touching Jane’s was her maternal grandmother, her namesake Jane Leigh, née Walker. As well as the blunt genealogical details – that she was born, that she was related to families of Walkers and Perrots, that she married, had six children, and was widowed – we know that she lived with her daughter and son-in-law in the vicarage at Steventon for a time before she died. She’s buried in the churchyard there. Inside the church, a small square stone, so plain as to be almost entirely pointless, is set slantwise into the floor by the altar. It doesn’t even mention her maiden name.
Few of the characters in Jane’s novels are grandparents, except to the youngest of grandchildren; and none of her central heroes or heroines has a single grandparent living.b A reader might imagine that no one survived much beyond 50 in the early nineteenth century, though in fact, if you adjust for the far higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy wasn’t so very much lower than it is today.
In their secret hearts, though, there were those who might have wished that it was.
In Britain, in the early nineteenth century, land was everything. If you wanted to sit on a jury, to serve as a magistrate, to vote in elections, to hunt, it was the ownership of land over a certain value which qualified you to do it. Without land, you were nothing, certainly not a fully-functioning member of society. Add a desire to mimic the behaviour of the aristocracy, and, on top of that, the fact that a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s when she married, unless complex legal documents were drawn up first, and it starts to become apparent why family estates were almost always left to eldest sons. Where land was power and influence, only a fool would choose to squander that influence or to see it pass into another family altogether.
If you were to die tomorrow intestate – that is, without leaving a testament, a will – modern English law would hand your property, up to a certain amount, to your spouse.c If you were worth more, a portion would be set aside for your children. If you had neither children nor spouse, then your property would track back up your family tree – parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and so on. The division is based, essentially, on the degree of their biological relationship to you; it’s mathematically exact, scrupulously equal. People who have been legally adopted into your family are included; so too, in most cases, are family members born outside marriage.
Two hundred years ago, intestacy worked very differently.
In the absence of any other financial arrangements, a widow was entitled to ‘jointure’ – that is, she could use a third of her late husband’s property until she died, when it would be reabsorbed into his estate. But if, say, a man died unmarried leaving two sons, three daughters, and no will, all his land – every square inch of it – would be handed straight to the oldest son. Intestacy law wouldn’t hand full legal ownership of land to a wife. It would hand it to a daughter, or daughters, only when there were no sons. And in that case, in a return to what feels more like natural fairness, the sisters would all inherit equally. But illegitimate children weren’t included at all.
There are countries where it’s impossible to disinherit any of your children. In eighteenth-century England, the state was waiting to do it for you. Primogeniture amounted almost to a fetish and first-born sons were very nearly sacred.
Jane’s extended family included aristocrats, and money, too.d There was an estate – Stoneleigh Abbey, in Warwickshire – shimmering mirage-like in the distance. But the life Jane’s parents lived wasn’t aristocratic or monied or propertied. If Grandfather Leigh really had been loth to acquire Mr Austen as a son-in-law, he had a point. George Austen wasn’t that much of a catch. He had no fortune or property; he had hardly any family behind him – no financial resources, no network of support. His only asset was the distant relationship to the Knights – the couple who essentially gave him the job at Steventon and ended up adopting his son Edward. It’s easy to laugh at Mary Crawford, when in Mansfield Park she asserts that ‘there is generally an uncle or a grandfather to leave a fortune to the second son’. It�
�s wishful thinking, a sign of how privileged – and spoiled – she is, but younger children couldn’t live on air, and the fewer relations they had, the less chance there was of anyone leaving them anything.
The Austen parents had inherited only very small sums of money themselves; they had eight children. They’d always known that whenever the Reverend George Austen died, the rectory at Steventon would be needed for the new vicar and his family.
Their behaviour as parents indicates a certain amount of hard-headed practicality in the face of this knowledge. They gave up one son to the rich relatives who lacked an heir of their own. The two youngest sons – Frank and Charles – were sent off to the navy as children. Joining the army, even as a junior officer, cost a substantial amount of money; joining the navy didn’t.
But, in spite of the fact that they had so little to leave, and so many children, in spite of the fact that Mr Austen knew for himself what it was like to be disinherited, they couldn’t shake off the cultural prejudice in favour of oldest sons.
At the end of 1800 Jane’s father decided to hand his parish over to his eldest son James and retire to Bath. Mr Austen could easily have done what most other vicars did when they felt that the demands of the job were getting too much: he could have employed a curate (a junior clergyman), reserving most of the parish income for himself, or, indeed, saving it to leave among his children. Instead, he gave the lion’s share of his income, the family home, and almost everything in it to James.
James had a daughter, Anna, by his first marriage. In 1798, his second wife Mary had given birth to a son. This son – the James-Edward who would later become Jane’s second biographer – wasn’t the first Austen grandson, but he was the first who was at all likely to carry on the family name. Edward’s children were nominally Austens, but it was already apparent that Edward would probably have to change his surname to that of his adoptive parents. Frank and Charles weren’t, in 1800, in a position to think of marrying. George junior (subject to mysterious fits, seldom mentioned) would never do so. Henry, whose wife was nearing 40, appeared unlikely to produce children of his own.
In James, and his son, lay the future of the Austen line, as far as Mr Austen was concerned. Even so, abandoning his job, his position, his house, as he did, was a very unusual decision to take.
In 1805, announcing the news of their father’s death to her brother Frank, Jane called him an ‘excellent’ parent, full of ‘tenderness’.1 But however indulgent he might otherwise have been – buying Jane notebooks, encouraging her in her writing, perhaps even teaching her a smattering of Latin – he did very little for her, in terms of securing her future.e He clearly believed that sons, especially eldest sons, were of greater importance than daughters. It was irrelevant that James was already able to support himself and his family, and had expectations of inheriting from a rich uncle – his comfort and security, his pride, mattered more than that of his sisters. Mr and Mrs Austen, in fact, hardly seem to have considered their daughters. Perhaps they imagined that Edward, adopted into luxury, would always keep a roof over their heads. No effort was made to provide the Austen girls with even the smallest of independent dowries. Cassandra inherited a little money on the death of her fiancé, enough that she would always be just about able to support herself. She’d been lucky to find a man who was willing to marry her, when she had nothing to bring to the table.
Jane was penniless. Her father may have loved her, but at his death he left her nothing at all, and even before he died, he’d made her homeless.
Nowhere in her surviving letters is Jane openly critical of her father, or of her brothers. But in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice she permits herself to write about the carelessness, and thoughtlessness, of men who do nothing to provide for their female dependants, and to touch on female financial anxiety, and the psychological pressures of being beholden to more fortunate relations.
Readers influenced by the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice may see Mr Bennet as an affable, mildly eccentric, delightfully humorous father. Jane makes it clear, though, that he is dangerously lax – ineffectual, incompetent. According to Lizzy, her father has ‘talents’, but they have not been ‘rightly used’ – a damning indictment in a church-going culture still steeped in the language and stories of the Bible.f He has not ‘done his duty’ – his financial duty. When Mr Bennet was first married, ‘economy was held to be perfectly useless’. When, later, he began to wish that ‘instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him’, he only wished it, and failed to actually do anything, persuading himself that ‘it was too late to begin saving’.
Elinor and Marianne’s father, in Sense and Sensibility, is another financial incompetent, far happier to live off other people than to take the trouble of husbanding his own fortune, or of earning money for himself. We’re given ample information to enable us to work out his financial situation and to judge of the common sense – or otherwise – shown by his behaviour over the years. Though his own independent fortune is small, his first wife was an heiress (her fortune ‘had been large’), and until he himself dies he enjoys half the income from her money. When he was first invited to live with his uncle, the financially prudent course would have been to rent out his own property at Stanhill, rather than to sell it. If he’d done that, then there would have been twelve years of rental income to put aside for his second family and – crucially – they would still have owned the house itself.
Can we trace these fictional examples of financial mismanagement back into Jane’s own life? Perhaps. It’s difficult to pin down the composition of either novel to a particular point in time. There was, by 1799, a manuscript known as First Impressions.g Whether or not this is the manuscript which Jane’s father sent to the high-profile publisher Thomas Cadell in 1797 we simply don’t know; nor can we be sure that First Impressions became Pride and Prejudice – plenty of character reassessment goes on in Sense and Sensibility, after all, and indeed in all of Jane’s novels. The family tradition that there was an earlier version of Sense and Sensibility entitled Elinor and Marianne is just that, family tradition, possibly true, possibly complete fiction, just like the often-repeated assertion that either or both of the books were originally written in the form of letters between the characters.
But it’s certainly conceivable that Sense and Sensibility was first written, in some form, during the 1790s. A reference to ‘a needle book made by some emigrant’, given as a gift, indicates a setting during the period when London was full of refugees from the French Revolution, many of them impoverished and reliant on charity. The term was fairly common during that decade (a 1793 poem by the popular writer Charlotte Smith is entitled The Emigrants) but was falling out of use by the time of publication in 1811, at least in England: its presence is likely to have made the novel seem either a little dated or historical to its first readers.
A sister of Colonel Brandon’s – referred to only once, in passing – is, somewhat unexpectedly, in Avignon in the south of France, for her health. This suggests a very much more restricted time setting: 1802–3, during the Peace of Amiens, the only period between 1794 and 1814 when travel to France was possible. Marianne admires the poetry of William Cowper – a poet we’ll encounter again – and of Walter Scott. Cowper’s work was popular throughout the 1790s and the first decades of the nineteenth century and so doesn’t give us any indication as to time.
Nowadays Scott is best known for his novels (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy) but from 1805 he found fame as a poet. There were earlier books of his poetry – a collection of translated German ballads, published in 1796, and The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which appeared at the beginning of the following decade. But Scott wasn’t anything like as widely known in the 1790s as he became a few years later. Mentioning his name would, though, have been an easy way to update the novel in 1811.
There are one or two other elements in Sense and Sensibi
lity which may perhaps point to revision taking place after 1805, and even as late as 1809–10. As we saw in Chapter 1, it was in the summer of 1809 that Jane, her sister Cassandra, their mother, and their old friend Martha Lloyd set up home together in the village of Chawton in Hampshire, in a cottage made available to them by Edward Austen. Edward owned a large house and estate at Chawton in addition to his Kentish property.
Chawton Cottage resembles, in almost every particular, even name, Barton Cottage, the small house to which the Dashwood women – all four of them – are obliged to remove:
As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles. A narrow passage led directly through the house into the garden behind. On each side of the entrance was a sitting room, about sixteen feet square; and beyond them were the offices and the stairs. Four bed-rooms and two garrets formed the rest of the house.
This could almost be a description of Chawton Cottage, which is now open to visitors as the Jane Austen House Museum.h Both the real and the fictional cottages are part of the estate of a rich male relation.
Edward’s generosity was welcome, but it was a trifle tardy. The Reverend Austen had died in January 1805, meaning that it took Edward four and a half years to get around to providing his widowed mother and his sisters with a home, four and a half years in which the Austen women had moved from Green Park Buildings to other sets of rooms in Bath, first on Gay Street, then on Trim Street; had paid lengthy visits to Kent, to Bristol, to Gloucestershire, to Staffordshire, before moving to Southampton, to the house in Castle Square where we encountered Jane at the beginning of Chapter 1. So far as we can tell, the offer of the cottage at Chawton arose almost immediately after the death of Edward’s wife Elizabeth – an intriguing coincidence, though one about which we can do no more than speculate.