and 1805, she was affected by the business of removing from one home to another we may gauge from something she said to
Cassandra apropos of the simple business of keeping house in her sister's absence: "I find composition impossible with my head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb." An upheaval that began with her father's death and ended in their leaving Bath seems ample reason for her to have abandoned further work on Lady Susan or any other project for the year 1806. If we adopt this mode of reckoning, the eight years' mysterious silence resolve themselves into three, from 1806 to 1809; and those who admire the exquisite solidity of Jane Austen's works of art will not feel that three years in which she apparently did nothing require a dramatic explanation.
In the late summer of 1804 Mr. and Mrs. Austen with Cassandra and Jane went to Lyme Regis. Henry and Eliza joined them, and the four younger people took long walks in the environs of Lyme. When the Henry Austens left the party they took Cassandra with them and went on to Weymouth.
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Jane delighted in Lyme, and when she wrote Persuasion at the end of her life the place was fresh and lovely in her recollection. She speaks in it of the principal street almost hurrying into the water; the view on either side of the bay of Lyme--Pinney, with "its green chasms between romantic rocks," and Charmouth, with "its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation" and describes a before-breakfast walk, in which Anne Elliot and Henrietta Musgrove
"went to the sands to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted."
On Cassandra's leaving them they had moved into lodgings in a
small brown-painted house on the Cobb's side of the bay, almost on the level of the shore. Jane told Cassandra: "The servants behave very well and make no difficulties, tho' certainly nothing can exceed the inconvenience of the offices, except the general dirtiness of the house and furniture and all its inhabitants. . . . I endeavor as far as I can to supply your place and be useful, and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water decanters as fast as I can." They had a servant called James, who blacked Mrs. Austen's shoes as they had never been blacked before, waited excellently at table, was attentive, quick and quiet, and, to add to his perfections, wanted to return to Bath with them. Jane promoted his taking an afternoon walk to
Charmouth with their maid Jenny. She said: "I am glad to have such an amusement for him as I am very anxious for his being at once quiet and happy." As he could read, she was anxious also to find some books for him; unfortunately he had read the first volume of Robinson Crusoe, but the Austens shared a newspaper with another family, and that, she said, she should take care to
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lend him. Although it was the 14th of September, it was still warm enough to bathe. "The bathing was so delightful this morning . . .
that I believe I staid in rather too long, as since the middle of the day I have felt unreasonably tired. I shall be more careful another time, and shall not bathe tomorrow as I had before intended." Perhaps one of the reasons for her fatigue was that she had been to a dance at the Assembly Rooms the night before. The era and those preceding it could show innumerable fascinating contrasts of sophisticated
elegance deposited in surroundings altogether rural and remote--a theatre in a park, a marble boathouse with Latin inscriptions among the reeds and flags of a wasteland mere--and none of them perhaps more strangely charming than the Assembly Rooms of Lyme Regis, built on a projection of the seafront at the left-hand side of the bay, with its glass chandelier and painted panels, and its windows from which the dancers could see nothing but sky and sea. Jane said the ball had been pleasant, though not full for Thursday. Mr. Austen had left at half-past nine and "walked home with James and a lanthorn,"
though the lantern was not necessary, as the moon was up. Mrs.
Austen had sat till Jane came away. The latter did not dance the first two dances, but she danced the next two, and might have danced more if she had allowed a friend to introduce to her a Mr. Granville, which offer she declined, and if she had encouraged the advances of
"a new, odd-looking man" who had been eyeing her for some time and at last, without any introduction, asked her if she meant to dance again. Jane thought from his free behavior that he must be Irish; she thought he belonged to some Honorable Barnwells, who were, she said, "the son and son's wife of an Irish viscount, bold, queer-looking people, just fit to be quality at Lyme."
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The girl who had asked to introduce Mr. Granville to Jane was a Miss Armstrong, whose acquaintance they had made at Lyme. Jane told Cassandra that Miss Armstrong, like many young ladies, was considerably genteeler than her parents. She had called on the family and been introduced to them, and Mrs. Armstrong had sat darning a pair of stockings the whole of Jane's visit. With a recollection of her own mother's practical habits, Jane added: "But do not mention this at home lest a warning should act as an example." Miss Armstrong had taken her for a walk on the Cobb afterwards; Jane said she was really very pleasant, but--"she seems to like people rather too easily."
Cassandra had gone to Ibthrop on leaving Henry and Eliza, but they were all back in Bath for the winter, and Jane had written the opening chapters of the story to which she had given no name, and which was to be published long after her death with the title of The Watsons. With her first novel declined before it had been read, and her second languishing in Mr. Crosby's office, whatever just
confidence she may have felt in her powers, she would have been surprised to know that the fragment she herself was soon to lay aside would one day be eagerly sought out, published with an apparatus criticus, studied with passionate earnestness and deplored only on account of being far too short. She talked to Cassandra about the story while she was still at work on it, and told her what were to be the ultimate fortunes of the characters, so that she had the completed scheme of the story in her mind and was at work on the first stages of filling it out. On December 16th she had her twenty-ninth
birthday, and on that day, although unknown to her at the time, she suffered the second serious loss of her existence. The carnage of the modern roads is so shocking that on looking back to an age less congested and without the menace of motor
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traffic, we are apt to overlook the tact that a vicious or frightened horse could sometimes prove as fatal as a weighty mass of
machinery that has escaped control. There had already been one tragedy in the Austen family circle from such a cause; six years before, in 1798, Jane Williams, less than two years after her
husband's triumphant capture of the Tribune, had been driving
herself in a one-horse chaise, when a startled dray-horse rushed violently into the road and collided with her carriage; she was thrown out, and picked up dead. On December 16th, 1804, Mrs.
Lefroy was out riding when her horse threw and killed her. There is no letter to show how deeply Jane felt the sudden horror of her loss; but four years later, on the anniversary of her birth and Mrs. Lefroy's death, she wrote some verses which showed that when she overcame grief she did not do it by oblivion. For the last three years of her life she had gone through much sorrow and distress, and her writing had taken the form of revising and finishing a work whose spring of inspiration had started in an earlier and happier time. The new novel she began did not carry itself far; she gave it up now. But she did not destroy the manuscript of The Watsons, and though one is conscious of acute disappointment as one becomes more and more interested in the characters and aware at the same time of the dwindling number of pages ahead, yet since we cannot have the story as a novel, we make a virtue of necessity and admit that as one of Jane Austen's fragments its value is great.
In The Watsons the characters are so completely realized that the expansion of the story through
volumes could not add to our
knowledge of them; yet the necessary information as to their
circumstances and their past is conveyed in a manner more summary than was usual even with Jane Austen's economy. To say that we have an outline would be
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incorrect; we have, on the contrary, the solid figures of Emma Watson, her sisters Elizabeth, Penelope and Margaret, her brother Robert and her sister-in-law Jane, her invalid father; and we have not only the characters themselves, of whom we are conscious almost as if they were living beings, but we have that truest interest and delight among those a novel can furnish, the relation of these characters to each other and the variety of discord and harmony produced by the note which is struck by each mingling with those given off by the rest.
At the same time one may incline to believe that the relation of Emma's past life with the aunt who had adopted and meant to
provide for her, and had then returned her penniless to the family, from whom she had been brought up as a stranger, would, in a
finished version, have been conducted with slightly more detail, supplying more information as to how that event occurred, of whose complete probability we have already been convinced. In the same way we feel that here and there, there would have been a statement, a remark, two sentences of dialogue, which would have amplified our pleasure, in the sense that though one strawberry is all that is necessary to show how strawberries taste, it is pleasanter to have a dishful.
The actual structure of the sentences is characteristically perfect, but they seem sometimes to follow each other more abruptly than is usual in Jane Austen's style; and though she used dashes very
frequently in the revised and completed form of her work, the
number of dashes between sentences in The Watsons is higher than it is in the completed novels: they appear, in fact, as frequently as they do in the letters.
In examining the fragment from the point of view of learning what we can about Jane Austen's method of composition, we may come to different conclusions, but one
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fact is inescapable: that from the very foundation, her conception of her characters was as firm and faultless as it appears at the
conclusion of one of her masterpieces. They grow into life before our gaze as she makes her magic passes, too rapid for the eye to follow; but to her they were distinct, separated from herself, fully born, in other words, before she had written the first chapter.
Mr. Edward Austen Leigh suggests that Jane Austen laid aside The Watsons because she had "become aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in a position of poverty and obscurity, which, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it; and therefore, like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain." One cannot feel that this reason is a convincing one, if only because Emma Watson is shown to such triumphant advantage in the poverty and obscurity of her home, as on the occasion when the pernicious Tom Musgrave brought Lord Osborne to call just as he knew that the table would be being laid for the Watsons' unfashionably early dinner.
Nevertheless, there is something painful in The Watsons. It is a study, of uncompromising realism, of three women desperately
anxious to get themselves married. Of the four sisters, Emma is outside this circle, and Penelope, though we feel we know almost all there is to know about her, we do not actually see; Elizabeth, the eldest of all, and Margaret, the youngest except Emma, show this desire through the medium of their widely differing characters.
Elizabeth, sane and good-natured, disposed to be fond of all her sisters, and welcoming Emma with a delight that is almost
incredulous after her experiences of Penelope and Margaret, feels to the full how necessary a marriage is, both from the practical and the emotional aspect of happiness, and has also
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been badly treated both by Penelope and by a flirtatious young man some years before; yet she has not become soured; her
disappointment does not interfere with a hearty cheerfulness and an innocent delight in Emma's interest and happiness. Her attitude to marriage is contrasted with Emma's in a conversation between the two. "You know, we must marry. I could do very well single for my own part--a little company and a pleasant ball now and then would be enough for me, if one could be young for ever, but my father cannot provide for us, and it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at." She goes on to narrate the adventures of Penelope, who is staying with her friends the Shaws, to be near "a rich old Dr.
Harding." "I suspect the Doctor to have had an attack of the Asthma-
-and that she was hurried away on that account--the Shaws are quite on her side.--At least I believe so--but she tells me nothing. She professes to keep her own counsel: she says, and truly enough, that
'too many cooks spoil the broth."
"'I am sorry for her anxieties,' said Emma--'but I do not like her opinions. I shall be afraid of her.--She must have too masculine and bold a temper.--To be so bent on marriage--to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation--is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be Teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.'"
"'I would rather do anything than be Teacher at a school----' said her sister. ' I have been at school, Emma, and know what a life they lead; you never have.--I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself--but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men; I think I could like any good-humored man with a comfortable
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income. I suppose my aunt brought you up to be rather refined.'"
Elizabeth inspires pity and liking; the element of horror is supplied by Margaret, with her features pretty but too sharp and restless, and her voice drawlingly soft and sweet in company and snappishly ill-tempered behind the scenes. Her character is exceedingly
disagreeable, but the eagerness and frustration are depicted with such oppressive vividness that what would be contemptuous dislike gives way to a feeling of shocked sympathy.
It has sometimes been asserted that Jane Austen's novels are
preoccupied to a sordid extent with the business of marrying. There is, in each of her novels, much anxiety expressed by the elder generation that the younger members should not throw away the
chance of a good establishment for a mere whim of personal
reluctance; but this is treated by Jane Austen either as material for comedy, as in the case of Mrs. Ferrars or General Tilney or Mrs.
Bennet, or with severe criticism as in that of Sir Thomas Bertram and Lady Russell. She did, however, arrange for her heroines, as a matter of course, more financial security than the modern author would feel obliged to stipulate for; and there are some who will regard the existence of Mr. Darcy's park as sufficient to dispel the claims of Jane Austen to be considered a great novelist.
More interesting perhaps than the contention that she is preoccupied with the incomes of the suitors, is a discussion of the simple fact that Jane Austen depicts every heroine as marrying at the end of the book. To say that even nowadays the vast proportion of novels deal with the love affairs, if not the marriage, of the protagonists, is of course, in sober earnest, neither here nor there. From a writer of Jane Austen's eminence we have a right to expect that we shall be given a
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picture of life viewed from a rational rather than a popular angle, and it was clearly her considered opinion, not only that a happy marriage was the best thing for everybody--in which, after all, many people would concur today--but that the great majority of women were
concerned in getting themselves married as the most important
accomplishment in their career. The people whom she approved of: women like Emma Watson and Elizabeth Bennet, did not regard an eligible marriage as the first objec
t of existence, though a very desirable one; but quite pleasant, respectable girls of a less disinterested and exacting nature were prepared to command their affections to a very considerable extent. The overbearing desire for romance, or sexual satisfaction, or marriage, or all these, as such, irrespective of a genuine attraction, is shown constantly in her less important female characters: in the Steele sisters, in Isabella Thorpe, in Lydia Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, in Maria Rushworth and
Harriet Smith, and Louisa Musgrove and Penelope and Margaret
Watson; in fact, with all of them it really appears their most important consideration. The point at issue is whether Jane Austen gave undue importance to a state of affairs which existed only at a time when women of the upper middle class who were single and
unprovided for had no refuge open to them but a post as governess or companion, or lingering out an existence in genteel distress.
In one instance, but in one only, we feel that modern conditions of wage-earning employment for women would have altered Jane
Austen's treatment of a character had she been writing today. Today, so sensible and respectable a woman as Charlotte Lucas, the intimate friend of Elizabeth Bennet, would not have felt herself obliged to marry Mr. Collins.
But of the other characters, it is true that so realistic a writer as Jane Austen would today have described some--or
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perhaps all of them--as engaged in some wage-earning pursuit; they might be typists or assistants in a friend's hat shop, or kennel maids or apprenticed to teachers of ballroom dancing and elocution, or students at an art school or an academy of music; but would their natures have been radically altered by these conditions? Would they have been less excited by the presence of men, less prone to think that pleasure means the admiration and society of the opposite sex, less anxious and hopeful in looking forward to a marriage that would put an end to the necessity of their earning a living?
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