by Helena Kelly
Amongst the interments in this pile, is one of a lady whose virtues, talents, and accomplishments entitle her not only to distinguished notice, but to the admiration of every person who has a heart to feel and a mind to appreciate female work and merit. The lady alluded to, Miss Jane Austen, who was buried here, July 1817, was author of four novels of considerable interest and value. In the last, a posthumous publication, entitled ‘Northanger Abbey,’ is a sketch of a memoir of the amiable author.2
The story about the cathedral verger who, in the 1850s, was so terribly bemused that visitors should want to see Jane’s grave probably isn’t true. There was, at any rate, no excuse for the verger’s ignorance, since the grave of ‘Miss Jane Austen, the authoress’ is included in the short list of ‘Chief Monuments’ in the 1854 Cathedral Handbook.3
The visitors came, and they keep coming.
They come to see Jane. They hurry past the war memorials, and the tombs of dead bishops. They scuff the painted floor tiles, centuries old. They glance at the place where Saint Swithin’s shrine used to stand, peer at the small statue of the diver who shored up the cathedral’s watery foundations, perhaps descend briefly into the dankness of the crypt. And then they go to stand in front of Jane’s gravestone and pay homage.
From the moment her first novel was published, Jane’s readers have been unable to ignore her. They’ve been drawn to compare themselves to her characters, or to fall in love with them. They’ve read her over and over again. Some of them have rejected her, angrily, confusedly. Some of them have suggested she should be used as a form of medication. Her novels are powerful. Even if they haven’t understood everything that she wrote, readers have always been able to sense that. It’s why she’s still being read now, when Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney and Sir Walter Scott are only footnotes in literary history.
I began this book with Jane’s letter to the publisher Richard Crosby, and it’s him I come back to. Because in the end, Jane was perfectly right to have been ‘mad’ with Crosby & Co. It was their fault that Susan – Northanger Abbey – wasn’t ever read by the audience it had been intended for. And that first failure may well have been responsible for what looks like a substantial delay in sending out the books we know as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, with the result that they, too, were never read in the context their author had intended. They were misread, by most, at least, as light and delightful, not as anything more substantial. And by then, the damage was done. Critics, convinced that they understood the kind of novels Jane was writing, ignored the less comfortable, more challenging ideas in Emma and Persuasion, or, where a pretence of ignorance was impossible, as with Mansfield Park, pretended that the novel didn’t exist.
If Jane’s first novels had appeared earlier, when they were meant to, they could never have been so thoroughly, so almost universally, misunderstood. The family could have concealed and equivocated as much as they liked; it wouldn’t have been as successful. All the presumptions and preconceptions – they wouldn’t have been able to take root in the way that they did. From the very beginning, we would all have approached Jane differently, we would have read her differently. We’d have seen her more for what she was.
Because in the end it doesn’t matter whether Jane wrote her own obituary, or whether or not she wanted to be buried in Winchester cathedral. It doesn’t matter how she died, who she loved, or what she looked like.
In the last chapter I mocked the enthusiasm of the 1823 reviewer who believed that Anne Elliot was an authorial self-portrait, but it’s that anonymous review which, in the end, contains one of the most insightful judgements about Jane, and her work:
– a scanty and insufficient memoir […] is all the history of her life, that we or the world have before us; but, perhaps, that history is not wanted, – her own works furnish that history. Those imaginary people, to whom she gave their most beautiful ideal existence, survive to speak for her, now that she herself is gone.
Forget the Jane Austen you think you know. Forget the biographies, forget the pretty adaptations. Ignore the banknote. Read Jane’s novels. They’re there to speak for her; love stories, yes, though not always happy ones, but also the productions of an extraordinary mind, in an extraordinary age.
Read them again.
Footnotes
a Based on Jane Austen’s letters to various correspondents and her will (April and May 1817), and Cassandra Austen’s letter to Fanny Knight (July 1817).
b Though we can, I think, probably discount the theory that Jane was murdered by one of her sisters-in-law, floated – half-seriously – in Lindsay Ashford’s 2011 novel The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen.
c A letter of May 1813 refers to visiting exhibitions of paintings.
d ‘I have an idea that agitation does […] as much harm as fatigue’; letter to Cassandra Austen, 8th–9th September 1816.
e See letter to Charles Austen, 6th April 1817. Her will wasn’t witnessed, possibly an indication that she didn’t discuss it with anybody else.
f Mrs Heathcote was a long-standing friend of the Austens, and for many years a near neighbour. Before her marriage she had been Elizabeth Bigg. Her brother had, according to much later family rumour, once been engaged to Jane, for one night only, but the engagement, if it really had ever happened, was now long forgotten. Her younger sister was also a friend, but she was at this point travelling on the Continent, as Jane noted: ‘we shall not have Miss Bigg, she being frisked off like half England, into Switzerland.’
g The ‘final’ letter which Henry Austen quotes snippets from in his Biographical Notice of the Author doesn’t survive; given the fibs he tells elsewhere in the Notice, I think we have to be suspicious of whether the quotations are even genuine, certainly of whether they were taken out of context, or from earlier correspondence.
h This is the old term for hydrocephalus; Harriet lived for another five decades, so if the diagnosis was correct she seems to have escaped any life-threatening complications.
i Uncle Leigh-Perrot divided his estate unequally between his wife, his eldest nephew James, and six of Mrs Austen’s other children, should they survive his widow. Two nephews are left out entirely – one is Edward Cooper, the other is George Austen Junior, who is almost always missing from the family record. The will’s structured in such a way that, though James was left the quite onerous task of acting as a trustee to his aunt, there was no financial benefit to the Austen family at all until Mrs Leigh-Perrot died.
j See Hampshire Telegraph, Hampshire Chronicle, and Salisbury and Winchester Journal, all Monday 21st July 1817.
k ‘Yesterday morning died in College-street, Miss Jane Austin, of Chalton near Alton, in this county.’
l This was picked up and reprinted, with varying changes, by other newspapers.
m The conservative writer Hannah More uses it too, but she moved in evangelical circles.
n One of North’s grandsons was appointed to the (paid) role of registrar of the diocese as a child.
FURTHER READING
Henry Austen, A Biographical Notice of the Author (published with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 1817/1818)
James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870, 1871)
Fanny Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778)
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)
Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade (1808)
William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830)
William Cowper, The Task (1785)
Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society (1802)
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801)
William Godwin, Caleb Williams, or Things as they Are (1794)
Anne Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–41)
Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle (1788)
— The Emigrants (1793)
— Beachy Head (1807)
Robert Southey, Espriella’s letters, translated from the Spanish (1807)
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Paula Byrne, Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (HarperCollins, 2014)
Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class 1780–1850 (Routledge, 1987, 2002)
Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Johns Hopkins UP, 1971, 1994)
Celia Easton, ‘Jane Austen and the Enclosure Movement: The Sense and Sensibility of Land Reform’, in Persuasions 24 (2002): 71–89, p. 88.
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (Macmillan, 2005; also subtitled ‘Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves’)
Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge UP, 2004)
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (BBC Books, 2006)
Colleen Sheehan, ‘Jane Austen’s “Tribute” to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled with Difficulty’, and ‘Lampooning the Prince: A Second Solution to the Second Charade in Emma’, both in Persuasions On-Line V.27, No. 1 (Winter 2006), www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/
Raymond Williams, ‘Three around Farnham’, in The Country and the City (Hogarth Press, 1973, Oxford UP, 1975)
NOTES
Chapter 2: Northanger Abbey
1. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 17th May 1799.
2. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 2nd June 1799.
3. It’s advertised in the Bath Chronicle for that week.
4. Letter to Fanny Knight, probably spring 1817.
5. Letter to Cassandra Austen, Thursday 20th–Friday 21st November 1800.
6. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 27th–28th October 1798.
7. Letter to Cassandra Austen, probably Tuesday 12th–Wednesday 13th May 1801.
8. Chester Courant, 26th March 1805, p. 4.
9. Letter to Fanny Knight, Sunday 23rd–Tuesday 25th March 1817.
10. The Guardian, review of Val McDermid’s ‘updating’ of Northanger Abbey, 2014.
Chapter 3: Sense and Sensibility
1. Letter to Francis Austen, 22nd January 1805.
2. British Critic, May 1812.
3. Letter to Fanny Knight, 30th November 1814.
4. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws and Constitution of England (1765–69).
5. Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class 1780–1850 (Routledge, 1987, 2002), p. 323.
Chapter 4: Pride and Prejudice
1. Hampshire Chronicle, Saturday 30th June 1798, p. 1.
2. Hampshire Chronicle, Saturday 9th September 1797.
3. Gloucester Journal, Monday 7th November 1796, p. 4.
4. Edinburgh Review, July 1830.
5. Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1816.
Chapter 5: Mansfield Park
1. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 17th–18th October 1815.
2. Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (BBC Books, 2006), p. 37.
3. Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando, eds, Civil Rights and African Americans: A Documentary History (Northwestern UP, 1991), p. 38.
4. Edward Long, Candid Reflections upon the Judgement Lately Awarded by the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster-Hall on What is Commonly Called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter (London, 1772), p. 34.
5. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 24th January 1813.
6. Chester Chronicle, 2nd December 1791, p. 3.
7. A catalogue of forest trees, flowering shrubs, plants, flower-roots, and seeds: sold by Gordon, Dermer, and Co. Seedsmen, In Fenchurch-Street, p. 110.
8. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, A sermon preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at their anniversary meeting (London, 1783), pp. 18–29.
9. Bryan Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes (Dublin, 1793), Vol. 2, pp. 34–5.
10. Robert Norris, A short account of the African slave trade, collected from local knowledge, from the evidence given at the bar of both Houses of Parliament (Liverpool, 1788), pp. 11–12.
11. Gilbert Francklyn, An answer to the Rev. Mr. Clarkson’s essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African; in a series of letters (London, 1789), pp. 88–9.
12. The Christian Instructor, or Congregational Magazine, March 1823, p. 136.
13. Letter to Cassandra Austen, Tuesday 24th January 1809.
14. Letter to Fanny Knight, Friday 18th–Sunday 20th November 1814.
15. Letter to Cassandra Austen, Sunday 8th–Monday 9th September 1816.
16. Letter from James Stanier Clark to Jane Austen, 16th November 1815.
Chapter 6: Emma
1. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 27th–28th October 1798.
2. UK National Ecosystem Assessment (2011).
3. Alan Everitt, ‘Common Land’, in The English Rural Landscape, ed. Joan Thirsk (Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 210–35, p. 210.
4. See Julie Jeffries, The UK population, past, present and future, part of the Office for National Statistics series, Focus on people and migration (2005).
5. S.J. Thompson, ‘Parliamentary enclosure, property, population, and the decline of classical republicanism in eighteenth-century Britain’, The Historical Journal, 51, 3 (2008), pp. 621–42, p. 624.
6. A.H. John, ‘Farming in Wartime: 1793–1815’, In Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution: Essays Presented to J.D. Chambers, ed. E.L. Jones and G.E. Mingay (London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1967), pp. 28–47, p. 30.
7. Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World (Viking, 2001/Penguin, 2002), p. 23.
8. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 2nd October 1808.
9. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 29th January 1813.
10. Virginia Woolf, unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement, 8th May 1913.
11. According to The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595–1918: A Cartographic Analysis and Electronic Catalogue, ed. Roger Kain et al. (Cambridge UP, 2004).
12. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 8th–9th January 1799; letter to Cassandra Austen, 26th June 1808.
13. Raymond Williams, ‘Three around Farnham’, in The Country and the City (Hogarth Press, 1973, Oxford UP, 1975).
Chapter 7: Persuasion
1. Letter to Cassandra Austen, 7th–9th October 1808.
2. Letter to Fanny Knight, 13th March 1817.
3. George Lewes, unsigned article, ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1859).
4. Retrospective Review, 1823, vii, pp. 131–5.
5. Letter to Francis Austen, 22nd January 1805.
6. Letter to Francis Austen, 25th September 1813.
7. The Bath Chronicle, 25th May 1815, p. 3.
Chapter 8: The End
1. Letter to Anne Sharp, 22nd May 1817.
2. John Britton, The history and antiquities of the see and cathedral church of Winchester (1817), p. 109.
3. M.E.C. Walcott, A Handbook for Winchester Cathedral (1854), p. 8.
INDEX
Note: Literary characters are listed under their surnames
A
Abdy, John (father) 242, 245
Abdy, John (son) 245, 249
abortion 47–8
accidents 282–4, 288
adopted children 246–7
Alexander, Emperor of All Russia 209
Allen, Mrs 41
Andrews, Miss 54
Anne, Queen 270
Annesley, Mrs 140
> Anning, Joseph 252
Anning, Mary 252–3, 254
Anning, Richard 253, 254
Antigua 177, 179, 180, 192
anxiety 128
apricots 188–9
Ashford, Lindsay 293
Auden, W.H. 87
Austen, Anna 50, 76, 170, 201
Austen, Cassandra (mother of Jane) 41, 113–14, 115, 298
Austen, Cassandra (sister of Jane) 2, 9, 10, 13, 211, 253–4, 299
after Jane’s death 301–2, 306
as confidante of Jane 27
death 301
fiancé 77, 81
and Jane’s final illness 291, 296, 297–9
Jane’s letters to
from Bath (1799) 35
from Chawton/London (1813–15) 116, 117–18, 163, 166, 190, 209, 223
from Lyme Regis (1804) 251, 254
from Steventon (1798–1801) 46–7, 71, 113–14
Austen, Charles (brother of Jane) 13, 113–14, 123, 165, 177, 213, 294, 299
Austen, Charles (nephew of Jane) 295
Austen, Edward 4–5, 10, 13, 164–5, 299
adoption 75, 192
in Bath 35–6, 41–2
and Chawton 80, 209–11
Austen, Eliza 5, 9–10, 13, 114, 131, 171, 254
Austen, Elizabeth (Lizzie, niece of Jane) 164
Austen, Elizabeth (wife of Edward) 35–6, 41, 52, 80
Austen, Fanny see Knight, Fanny
Austen, Frances 52
Austen, Francis (Frank) 13, 14, 17–18, 26, 261, 298, 299
in navy 75, 113–14, 188
Austen, George (brother of Jane) 13, 76, 300
Austen, George (father of Jane) 12, 16, 75–6, 177, 192, 257
death 76–7, 80, 261, 298
Austen, Harriet 299
Austen, Henry 5, 164–5, 171, 254, 295
Biographical Notice of the Author 19–21, 296, 297, 306
career 13, 123, 192, 302–3
childless 76
financial problems 299, 301
on Jane’s writing 261–2, 304
and publishers 18, 166
Austen, James 13, 72, 177, 299–300
at Steventon 72, 76, 192
Austen, Jane