Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  f Compare this to novels-in-letters of the period – Fanny Burney’s Evelina, for example, where, though the year may be left vague, almost every single letter is exactly and consistently dated as to day and month.

  g ‘Fain would I’ is equivalent to ‘I wish I could’.

  h Deirdre Le Faye’s Austen Family Chronicle gives 7th August, which seems to be an error. The Reading Mercury of Monday 20th August 1798 describes the accident as taking place ‘Thursday se’nnight’, that is, ‘a week last Thursday’, so the 9th. The Newcastle Courant and the Ipswich Journal both give the date as the 9th, in differently worded reports.

  i An Act for a Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God every Year on the Fifth Day of November, also known as the Thanksgiving Act.

  j There were dozens of people with a better claim to the British throne than George I.

  k We’re told that the Elliot family had been ‘first settled in Cheshire’, but not when they relocated to Somerset. The reference to their ‘exertions of loyalty’ during the Civil War possibly suggests we should imagine the first baronet aiding Charles II during the period that the king was hiding from parliamentary troops in the west country.

  l See, for example, England delineated, or, a geographical description of every county in England and Wales, published in 1788 by John Aikins: ‘At Lyme landed in 1685 the Duke of Monmouth, for the execution of his ill-judged design against James II which terminated in his own destruction and that of many others’ (pp. 309–10). Similarly, Philip Luckombe’s 1791 The beauties of England describes ‘Lyme-Regis, or King’s Lyme’ as ‘a sea-port of good trade, and remarkable for a pier, called the Cobb, situated about a quarter of a mile from the town, and which forms a harbor that perhaps has not its equal in Europe’, before immediately afterwards explaining that ‘The Duke of Monmouth landed here 1685, when he came against James II’ (pp. 32–3).

  m Mary I had no children. Elizabeth I never married. Mary II suffered two miscarriages, while her sister Anne, who experienced seventeen pregnancies in seventeen years, endured miscarriages, multiple still-births, and the eventual loss to disease of the children born living.

  n Jane makes a point of telling us that Captain Harville has gathered ‘something curious and valuable from all the distant countries’ he’s visited; he displays them in his rented house in Lyme. Are we meant to imagine that he has added, or will add, some of the Lyme ‘curiosities’ – fossils – to his collection? There is, too, a faintly reptilian flavour to two of the ships Captain Wentworth has sailed on – the Asp and the Laconia. ‘Asp’ is a poetic term for a snake. Sparta, in Laconia, was associated with serpents. There were dozens of other, non-reptilian ship names Jane could have used, or invented – she doesn’t.

  o Camden Crescent Viaduct Historic Building Report, 2006.

  p It may just be a coincidence that, among several other meanings, ‘cob’ is another name for hazelnut. By the later nineteenth century, a ‘cobb’ had also come to mean a blow to the head.

  q In the surviving manuscript chapters quite a number (though not all) of these kinds of words are hyphenated.

  r ‘[I]ts moral … seems to be, that young people should always marry according to their own inclinations.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The End

  Winchester, July 1817.a

  College Street is at present very quiet, very genteel, very suitable for an invalid such as herself. And there is really very little to be seen from her bedroom window, nothing of note, so that it hardly signifies that she cannot drag herself there. Hardly at all.

  Instead she conjures up the view from her own bedroom at Chawton or, before that, the garden in Castle Square in Southampton, remembers the tang of salt, the promise of spring. There is little else to do. She can listen to the bells tolling. She can compose comic verse in her head. She can lie staring at the ceiling, contemplating eternity.

  It is raining again, she’s told. Saint Swithin’s curse for moving his shrine, July in showers. As if one ever needed a curse to explain away the rain in England.

  Cassandra wishes her to rest, and Dr Lyford agrees, so at least someone is happy with her.

  Cassandra nurses her so devotedly. She only wishes that she felt she deserved it.

  She wishes she had been better, or braver. All through April and the first weeks of May, as she lay in her bed in her own room waiting for the end, she thought about what was left undone, unfinished. Such long confinements she has had, so much longer than her sisters-in-law with their babies.

  So many delays, so much time wasted.

  She has done them justice, to the best of her poor ability, her books, her children. She’s done all she could for them. Susan was always unlucky. Miss Lambe will never be born now, but she can see her, oh so clearly —

  What will become of them all, after she’s gone?

  I, Jane Austen, of the Parish of Chawton do by this my last Will & Testament give and bequeath … Well, it is written.

  She remembers driving through Winchester in the spring of 1809. She had thought she had another 30 or 40 years left to her then. But no. Eight years. She has had eight years.

  She should have liked to have seen Switzerland. The Alps. Beyond …

  She is so tired. Sleep – is that all – now – if she closes her eyes – to sleep —

  Pray for me, oh pray for me.

  Jane was only 41 when she died. She was ill, we know, but we have no idea what her final illness was.

  It may have been any one of the long list of ailments that have been suggested over the years; Addison’s disease, perhaps, or tuberculosis, or lymphoma, or breast or ovarian cancer. The most recent candidate is something called Brill-Zinsser disease, a rare recurrence of typhus. Equally, it may have been ulcerative colitis, or some other serious bowel issue. Several of Jane’s brothers tended to stomach disorders, and her hypochondriac mother claimed to as well; the condition often runs in families. Stomachs were, however, rather a preoccupation in the period, in part because one of the few effective medications, freely available over the counter and taken for anything and everything, was laudanum – alcoholic tincture of opium – which causes chronic constipation. The symptoms Jane mentions include ‘bile’ (digestive problems) and also backache, fever, fatigue, and oddities in her complexion (she refers to having been ‘black & white & every wrong colour’). Together, these don’t really point to any one diagnosis over another.b

  She seems to have dated the beginning of her illness to around the middle of 1816, when she was finishing Persuasion. Whatever it was, the symptoms came and went, periods of better health alternating with weeks or months when she was very ill indeed.

  Her response appears to have been to start writing another novel. We have it, in manuscript. We know it as Sanditon, though Jane herself may have had a different title in mind. It’s very much a draft, a work in progress; there are dashes, abbreviations, moments of clumsiness – it breaks off abruptly, in what looks to be the middle of a scene. Set after the Battle of Waterloo (it’s mentioned), in a brand-new seaside resort, it features a brace of entrepreneurs, a family of hypochondriacs, a would-be seducer, an impoverished companion, and some schoolgirls, one of whom is Jane’s first mixed-race character, a Miss Lambe, ‘about seventeen, half mulatto, chilly and tender’.

  So is this a new departure? Not entirely. Sanditon is a slightly uneasy combination of the old and the bracingly fresh. It begins with a carriage accident, a plot device which was already hackneyed when Jane was a teenager, and which she mocked in her early, exuberant novel-in-letters, Love and Freindship. The literary references are old, out of date; Fanny Burney’s Camilla, published in 1796, is briefly mentioned, while the active sexual fantasies of the self-styled seducer Sir Edward Denham were, Jane writes, first inspired by ‘all the impassioned, & most exceptionable [i.e. objectionable] parts’ of the novels of Samuel Richardson, written 60 or 70 years before. Towards the end of the manuscript, though, comes what is, for Jane, a highly unusual passage of landsc
ape description – unusual not simply in that it’s there, but in its depiction of a scene glimpsed through mist, reminiscent, we might think, of the idiosyncratic (and fiercely criticised) work of the artist J.M.W. Turner, whose pictures Jane may very plausibly have seen in some of her visits to London art galleries.c

  Jane may still have been keen to innovate, even on her sickbed. The presence of what was presumably to be a fairly prominent mixed-race character could easily have attracted adverse publicity, particularly if Jane meant to marry her off. Maria Edgeworth, recall, had been obliged to cut any references to interracial relationships from the second edition of her novel Belinda. We saw, when we looked at Mansfield Park, that Jane was alive to the hypocrisy and self-deception which surrounded Britain’s overseas slave-holdings. In Chapters 6 and 7, on Emma and Persuasion, we saw that she wasn’t afraid to court controversy. What might she have intended to do with Sanditon, if she’d lived? How much of the plot did she work out in her head and never get down onto paper? We have no way of knowing. We’re already, I think, on slightly shaky ground with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – novels which, so far as we can tell, Jane herself was still hesitating over letting anyone else read. If we’re going to draw any conclusions at all from Sanditon, we have to tread carefully.

  Jane began Sanditon thinking – hoping – that her condition would prove manageable. The abrasive attitude she takes in it to sickness and medicine feels like tough-minded positive thinking, determinedly adhered to. Certainly she seems to have been correct in her own belief that her condition was affected by her mental state.d As we’ll see in a minute, a number of stressful situations arose for the Austen family around the time that Jane fell ill. In the early spring of 1817 she suffered a particularly serious relapse after learning the terms of her uncle’s will – serious enough to inspire her to write her own.e By the middle of May, however, she was feeling somewhat recovered, and it was to promote her recovery that she went to stay in Winchester, a Dr Lyford at the hospital there having proved, she thought, helpful to her.

  So towards the end of May, Jane and Cassandra borrowed their brother James’s carriage, and, accompanied by Henry, travelled the sixteen miles from Chawton to Winchester, the old English capital which was once home to King Alfred the Great. They settled themselves in ‘comfortable Lodgings engaged for us by our kind friend Mrs Heathcote’, on College Street, in the shadow of Winchester cathedral.1

  Jane stood the journey very well, ‘with very little fatigue’ she assured her nephew and future biographer James-Edward, now a student at Exeter College Oxford. Indeed, she was ‘gaining strength very fast’ and no longer had to spend all day in bed. She was well enough to ‘sit upon the Sopha’, she wrote, with cautious cheerfulness; ‘I […] can employ myself, & walk from one room to another’. From the ‘Bow-window’ of their ‘neat little Drawg-room’, she could even look down into the garden of the headmaster of Winchester College, the great public school which James-Edward had attended, as did a number of his cousins. They would not be lonely. Another of Jane’s nephews, Charles, was a current pupil; he was to be invited to take breakfast with his aunts. Mrs Heathcote called every day.f

  Depression often accompanies severe illness, and Jane goes on to say that she cannot feel she is worthy of all the ‘Love’, of all her ‘anxious simpathizing friends’. But, though lamenting that neither her ‘handwriting’ nor her ‘face have yet recovered their proper beauty’, this letter of Jane’s is – faintly – optimistic about her prospects for recovery. ‘Mr Lyford says he will cure me’, she writes, and if he fails, well then, she jokes, she will seek redress from the ‘Dean & Chapter’, the cathedral officials.

  There was to be no cure, however. This letter to James-Edward, dated 27th May 1817, is the last of Jane’s we possess.g

  The final weeks of Jane’s life, from the end of May through June into July, are vague. Various family members visited. From what they wrote and remembered afterwards, we can identify a serious recurrence of Jane’s illness around the middle of June and a growing doubt that she would ever recover. What Jane was feeling, what she was thinking, we can only speculate. With regard to her death, we have little more than Cassandra’s record to rely on – a letter she wrote a few days afterwards to their niece Fanny. This kind of text is always suspect; lies cluster to death like flies. Suffering is always mercifully short, when it happens at all. The dead always look peaceful. But we can reconstruct the following timeline with a fair degree of confidence.

  On the evening of Tuesday 15th July Jane’s ‘complaint returnd’, and for the next ‘eight & forty hours she was more asleep than awake’. Jane’s ‘looks altered’, she ‘fell away’ – became gaunt – but, says Cassandra, ‘tho’ I was then hopeless of a recovery I had no suspicion how rapidly my loss was approaching’.

  15th July is the feast day of Saint Swithin, a ninth-century bishop of Winchester. According to tradition, the weather on his feast day will continue uninterrupted for the next 40 days – the saint’s punishment for the people of Winchester transferring his remains from the burial site he’d chosen. There is, in fact, a tendency for weather systems to sit over the British Isles for weeks at this time of year. It’s very possible that the comic poem about Saint Swithin and the Winchester races, usually attributed to Jane, was written on this Tuesday. In his Notice, Henry claims that Jane was well enough to write some verses shortly before she died, and these would certainly fit. Jane’s mastery of prose didn’t, as we’ve seen before, extend to poetry. The verses are fun, frivolous and, in their obsession with the weather, somehow uniquely English. There’s only one discordant note. At the end of one line the word ‘gone’ appears instead of what would fit the rhyme – ‘dead’.

  So do we have Jane’s final composition here? Well, perhaps. And perhaps a declaration of her belief in her own greatness, too. The story of Swithin’s curse, remembered by a dying writer, surely calls to mind the curse carved on the tomb of William Shakespeare (‘Good friend for Jesus sake forbear | To dig the dust enclosed here. | Blest be the man that spares these stones, | And cursed be he that moves my bones.’).

  On the Thursday, the 17th, Cassandra explained, she went out after dinner, ‘to do an errand which your dear aunt’ – Jane – ‘was anxious about’. She ‘returnd about a quarter before six’ to find her sister ‘recovering from faintness & oppression’. Jane was ‘able to give me a minute account of her seisure & when the clock struck 6 she was talking quietly to me’. The respite was brief. The ‘same faintness’ returned, followed this time ‘by the sufferings’ which left Jane struggling to find the words to express herself:

  She felt herself to be dying about half an hour before she became tranquil & aparently [sic] unconscious. During that half hour was her struggle, poor Soul! she said she could not tell us what she sufferd, tho she complaind of little fixed pain. When I asked her if there was any thing she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death & some of her words were ‘God grant me patience, Pray for me Oh Pray for me’.

  Dr Lyford was sent for. He ‘applied something to give her ease’ – almost certainly a substantial dose of laudanum – ‘& she was in a state of quiet insensibility by seven oclock at the latest’.

  From then on, according to Cassandra, Jane said nothing, and ‘scarcely moved a limb’. Let’s share Cassandra’s pious belief that ‘we have every reason to think, with gratitude to the Almighty, that her sufferings were over’, and that Jane couldn’t feel anything, that she didn’t dream. She was lying at what sounds to have been an incredibly awkward angle, with her head ‘almost off the bed’, for nine and a half hours. Cassandra and their sister-in-law Mary – James Austen’s wife – had to take turns to support Jane on a pillow on their laps. There was no movement at all, save ‘a slight motion of the head with every breath’. For those last hours, then, Jane was drugged, sprawled out without any attempt at decorum, her eyes shut, her breath hesitating every time, hesitating and, at length, stopping altogether.

  At half
past four in the morning of Friday 18th July, she died.

  She was, it’s fairly clear, killed with kindness. A dose of opiates strong enough to knock her out completely for nine hours has to have at least hastened her death. Most people who die from a heroin overdose die because their breathing stops; a number of physiological responses to heroin and other opiates work to depress respiration. We may have to consider the – frankly horrifying – possibility that Jane’s illness wouldn’t, on its own, have proved fatal, or not so soon; that it may have been the drugs, and only the drugs, which killed her.

  Her father had been well into his seventies when he died. Her mother was to live to the age of 87. Cassandra didn’t die until 1845. Frank, the closest of the siblings in age to Jane, survived to the 1860s, to be 91. Thirty, forty, even fifty years more wouldn’t have been far-fetched. Think – there could have been no uncertainty about what Jane looked like, no scope for the idealised portrait that’s going to be simpering up at us from the new £10 notes; we’d have photographs. Jane could have travelled to Europe, to America. She could have gone on trains, on steamships, met Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. She could have written another dozen novels.

  But instead, Cassandra closed Jane’s eyes. Then, from what she says, she went about the other ‘last services’, by which she seems to mean the business of laying Jane out – tidying her hair, straightening her limbs and her nightdress – and prepared to break the news to the rest of the Austens.

  The past couple of years had been hard for the wider Austen family. Edward was embroiled in a costly legal case over the Chawton estate. Early in 1816 Charles’s ship had been wrecked, and though the subsequent hearing cleared him of any blame, and no lives were lost, his career fell into the doldrums, as was the case with so many naval officers after the end of the wars with France. There had been Jane’s illness. The eldest of the eight siblings, James, had also been suffering from ill-health. He was too ill to attend Jane’s funeral and died two and a half years later. Charles’s daughter Harriet – Jane’s god-daughter – had been suffering from ‘water on the brain’, treated with mercury.h Then there was Henry. Henry, too, had been afflicted by bad luck, or perhaps the consequences of bad management, which spiralled out to affect half the people he knew, among them his servants, his mother, his siblings, and his nieces and nephews.