Anne is also in direct contrast to her predecessor, Emma. Where Emma is intent on imposing her will on society, Anne feels herself in a state of “perpetual estrangement” from it. Emma looks forward, Anne back. Emma rushes into mistakes, Anne has to live with the mistake of eight years earlier. “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” It is a statement you hardly expect from an Austen, but years later Cassandra wrote beside it in the margin of her copy of Persuasion the words “Dear, dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.”11
Emma lives at the centre of a stable circle, Anne among fragmented and shifting groups. Austen finds an opportunity here, and Anne’s isolation, and the way the story is told almost entirely through her eyes and thoughts, gives an extra emotional pull, putting readers into the position of her only confidantes. Her capacity for deep feeling and delight becomes ours; so do her suffering and hope, which she has no sister or friend to share with, only us. We are invited to fill the gap; few resist.
The last two chapters, as she revised them, are so dramatically crafted that they remain, even after many readings, almost unbearably tense and moving, as the lovers, unable to speak directly to one another, communicate by other means. Wentworth drops his pen, and pretends to be writing another letter when really he is writing to Anne. Every word she says to Harville is meant for Wentworth. She speaks from the heart, but Anne Elliot is a formidable woman, and she rises to eloquence and wit in defending her sex: “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing.” Like Marianne reproaching Sir John, she is speaking here for herself, but her creator is at her side; only this time she is not so much endorsing as disproving her words, because she has taken up the pen.
Her illness had not left her. The only letter from the last three months of 1816 is one congratulating her nephew James-Edward on leaving Winchester before going up to Oxford, and on his attempts at novel writing. All three of James’s children were now trying their hand at fiction; she had given Anna’s work close attention earlier, and kept up a correspondence with Caroline about her little stories too, reading and praising them patiently and kindly. Now she made her disclaimer about the “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush” to her nephew, contrasting her work with his “strong, manly, spirited Sketches.” It is a generous joke, so finely phrased that no one can forget it; a perfectly acceptable way of comparing herself with— say—Walter Scott, and in that way meant as encouragement to her clever young nephew. The letter is in fact a series of jokes; there is one about Uncle Henry’s “superior Sermons” being just the thing to insert into novels, and another about the vicar of Chawton, Mr. Papillon. He is, says Aunt Jane, about to make his long awaited proposal of marriage; the desirability of her marrying Mr. Papillon was a family jest which she joined in with remarkable good humour and tolerance, as was expected of a maiden aunt. Tucked in among the fooling, she insists she is “very well”; in truth she was not strong enough to walk the short distance to Anna’s house for dinner.
Other members of the family were also confined to their beds. James had been laid up early in the year with another fracture, probably the result of a fall while hunting; he had already broken his leg once, and an arm. Charles had rheumatism, and his little Harriet, treated with mercury and other horrors for her headaches, was so ill that Jane was driven to wish her dead: “I hope Heaven in its mercy will take her soon. Her poor Father will be quite worn out by his feelings for her.”12 And among neighbours too, Mrs. Chute’s adoptive daughter was reported to be dangerously ill by their common doctor, Lyford; she recovered, but not before Jane expressed her sympathy, imagining Mrs. Chute “would almost feel like a Mother in losing her.” The deaths of children were terrible, but their births were not always welcome. News that Anna seemed to be pregnant again upset her: “Anna has not a chance of escape; her husband called here the other day, & said she was pretty well but not equal to so long a walk . . . Poor Animal, 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.”
She continued to make resolute statements about her improving health. At the end of January 1817 she declared herself “stronger than I was half a year ago”—strong enough at any rate to walk into Alton, although not back again. She explained to Alethea that her problem was “Bile,” and that she now knew how to treat herself. To Fanny, she called her illness rheumatism, telling her she was almost entirely cured of it, “just a little pain in my knee now and then.” She gallantly attempted a donkey ride in the hope that it would do her good. Another letter insists “I am got tolerably well again,” and in any case, “Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life.” All her willpower was deployed to resist and deny the illness. Her letters to Fanny seem so high spirited that, while they must have caused delight in Kent, you almost wince to think what they cost the writer. Caroline’s recollections from this time underline just how far she was prepared to go in rejecting sickness.
Aunt Jane used often to lie down after dinner—My Grandmother herself was frequently on the sofa—sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening, at no fixed period of the day,—She had not bad health for her age, and she worked often for hours in the garden, and naturally wanted rest afterwards—There was only one sofa in the room—and Aunt Jane laid upon 3 chairs which she arranged for herself—I think she had a pillow, but it never looked comfortable—She called it her sofa, and even when the other was unoccupied, she never took it . . . I often asked her how she could like the chairs best—and I suppose I worried her into telling me the reason of her choice—which was, that if she ever used the sofa, Grandmama would be leaving it for her, and would not lie down, as she did now, whenever she felt inclined—.
It is a display of good manners carried to perfection; and proof of a fierce refusal to become an acknowledged invalid.
Now her will channelled all her remaining energy into the one essential thing, which was to make a start on a new novel. Sanditon is never mentioned in the letters, but between January and March she wrote twelve chapters of this most surprising book. If the appeal of Persuasion is linked for some to its being her last book, seen as a gentle dying fall, one glance at what actually came after it throws cold water on any such sentimental thought. What other fatally ill writer has embarked on a savage attack on hypochondria? There is no sign of failing energy; on the contrary, it sets off in an entirely new direction. The theme is unlike anything she had tackled before: a place, the seaside village that is being transformed into a resort, where the newly built Trafalgar House will be followed by the still newer Waterloo Crescent, because “Waterloo is more the thing now”; and where a young man on the make is speculatively “running up a little Cottage Ornèe, on a strip of Waste Ground.” The language is as fresh as the subject, and much of it is owed to a Mr. Parker, best described as a Regency public relations man.
Mr. Parker has given up his comfortable old family house to move to Trafalgar House, flagship of the keenly competitive development of Sanditon. It is “a second Wife & 4 Children to him—hardly less Dear—& certainly more engrossing.—He could talk of it for ever . . . it was his Mine, his Lottery, his Speculation & his Hobby Horse; his Occupation his Hope & his Futurity.” And it leaves Mrs. Parker not a little wistful. The modernity of the theme is startling: selling off the family silver, pouring money into “growth” while neglecting old values, all the emphasis on competitiveness, restlessness, salesmanship.
Sanditon—known by Cassandra as The Brothers and in the rest of the family simply as The Last Work until Chapman named and published it in 1925—offers much broader comedy than she had approached for years, and it extends a technique she had used successfully with Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton in Emma, that of the mo
nologue. Mr. Parker, enthusiastic about the signs of new ideas among the Sanditon shop-keepers, cries, “Civilization, Civilization indeed! . . . Look my dear Mary—Look at William Heeley’s windows.—Blue Shoes, & nankin Boots!—Who wd have expected such a sight at a Shoemaker’s in old Sanditon!—This is new within the Month. There was no blue shoe when we passed this way a month ago.—Glorious indeed!—Well, I think I have done something in my Day.” It is as though the spirit of Dickens Future was hovering over Jane Austen.13
The descriptive writing promises something entirely new too: a walk in a misty landscape reveals, through a park fence, “something White & Womanish in the field on the other side;—it was something which immediately brought Miss B. into her head—& stepping to the pales, she saw indeed . . . Miss Brereton seated, apparently very composedly—& Sir E.D. by her side. They were sitting so near together & appeared so closely engaged in gentle conversation, that Ch. instantly felt she had nothing to do but to step back again, & say not a word.” Whether you call this chiaroscuro or film technique before its time, it is unlike anything Austen has done before. Sir E.D. is a young baronet who has read enough Richardson to feel “that he was formed to be a dangerous Man”; this is what he is attempting to be in the mist in the park. Other characters are a stout malade imaginaire who prefers cocoa and toast to fresh air and exercise; and Mr. Parker’s sister Diana, the embodiment of “Activity run mad,” who cannot stop talking and organizing other people’s lives. The fragment breaks off before the reader can guess where Sanditon is going; only that it will be an original and entertaining journey, conducted by a keen observer with a freely ranging imagination.
The journey was not made, but set aside for a grimmer one. On 18 March she abandoned the manuscript, attacked by “fever and bilious attack” that made her too unwell “to write anything that was not strictly necessary.” She and Cass and their mother had just struggled reluctantly into their “old Black Gowns” again—how they must have hated them— in mourning for a distant cousin when, on 28 March, Uncle James Leigh-Perrot also died. He was eighty-two and his end was peaceful. Mrs. Austen grieved particularly for her brother; she also had hopes of what his will would do for her family. At this point Jane insisted that her own condition had improved enough to allow Cassandra to travel to Berkshire to help Aunt Leigh-Perrot. James, Mary and Francis all followed her for this important funeral—more important, one notices, than a family wedding—but when the will was read they found he had left everything to his widow, and that only after her death would legacies of £1,000 be paid to each of the Austen children. At Chawton, Mrs. Austen and Jane were stunned by this news. Jane suffered what she called a relapse, which she attributed to the shock, although to us it sounds like a continuation of her existing condition. Whatever it was, she had to ask for her sister’s return. This was early in April.
When Caroline and Anna called to see her,
She was keeping her room but said she would see us, and we went up to her—She was in her dressing gown and was sitting quite like an invalide in an arm chair—but she got up, and kindly greeted us—and then pointing to the seats which had been arranged for us by the fire, she said, “There’s a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline.” . . . I was struck by the alteration in herself—She was very pale—her voice was weak and low and there was about her, a general appearance of debility and suffering; but I have been told that she never had much actual pain—She was not equal to the exertion of talking to us, and our visit to the sick room was a very short one—Aunt Cassandra soon taking us away—I do not suppose we stayed a quarter of an hour; and I never saw Aunt Jane again.14
In mid-April she took to her bed, too weak to struggle on, with night fevers and a discharge, unspecified but alarming enough to make her accept the visit of a surgeon from Winchester, whose “applications gradually removed the Evil.” After this, and without letting anyone know, she wrote her will, dated 27 April and addressed to “Miss Austen” but unwitnessed. We can take it that from this point she had not too much faith in her own recovery; and, businesslike, she also wrote out an account of the profits on her novels, “over & above the £600 in Navy Fives.” They came to £84.13s.
After a visit from James and Mary, she agreed to be taken to Winchester to be under the care of the surgeons there; they were attached to a hospital, and thought likely to be as good as any in London. All this she explained in a letter to Anne Sharp just before setting out from Chawton. She explained that she had been very low but was recovering strength. It is a wonderful letter, written in her best voice, affectionate, vividly phrased, and liable to slip in a sentence you have to read again to catch the full effect: “If I live to be an old woman I must expect to wish I had died now, blessed in the tenderness of such a Family, & before I had survived either them or their affection.” She has become “a very genteel, portable sort of Invalid.” James has offered his carriage for the journey: “Now, that’s the sort of thing which Mrs. J. Austen does in the kindest manner! But still she is in the main not a liberal-minded Woman.” Ill as she is, her language is in perfect health, and used to its full effect. It is funny, it is honest, it is even warm where she is not usually warm: “my dear Mother . . . suffered much for me when I was at the worst.” Suddenly, surprisingly, she invokes the seventeenth-century French “sorceress” Eléonore Galigai de Concini who, according to Voltaire, told her judges before she was burned that her magic was simply the force that strong spirits exert over weak ones (“Mon sortilège a été le pouvoir que les âmes fortes doivent avoir sur les esprits faibles”). Was it Eliza who read Voltaire and told her about Eléonore? Whoever it was, “Galigai de Concini for ever & ever” wrote Jane, her own spirit strong enough for a sorceress. Anne Sharp treasured the letter, which was signed off “Sick or well, beleive me ever yr attached friend”; and she passed it on before her own death, like a true believer, into safe hands.15
Elizabeth Heathcote found lodgings for Cassandra and Jane in Winchester; Alethea was away in Switzerland, “frisked off like half England,” wrote Jane. They set off on 24 May. Henry rode the sixteen miles from Chawton beside the carriage in which his sisters sat. It rained all the way, a soft veil falling over the green landscape. Edward’s fourth son William rode alongside Henry, and Jane worried about the two of them getting wet. Then she settled in to their lodgings at No. 8, College Street, a modest house belonging to a Mrs. David. It stood between the school buildings at the back and the old city wall, with a strip of pleasant garden and a few trees at the front; built directly over the water meadows, with no cellars to keep out the damp. But they had the first floor, two sitting rooms, a bow window, and two good bedrooms at the back. She wrote to her nephew James-Edward, “Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, & if he fails I shall draw up a Memorial & lay it before the Dean & Chapter, & have no doubt of redress from that Pious, Learned & disinterested Body.”
Apart from a scrap, this was her last letter.
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College Street
At College Street, Elizabeth Heathcote called every day. Jane was taken out in a sedan chair and allowed to walk from one room to another, and insisted that she was getting better. It did not seem so to Cassandra. She sent for Mary Austen, who arrived on Friday, 6 June. “I dined with the Miss Austens and stay’d with Jane whilst Cass went to Church” is her diary entry for Sunday; and on the Monday, “Jane Austen worse I sat up with her.” Tuesday: “Jane in great danger.” The diary then falls silent for several days. Meanwhile Henry wrote to Fanny to warn her of her aunt’s condition; her diary for 14 June notes, “A letter to me from Uncle HA—a sad acct of my poor dear Aunt Jane.” He also sent a letter to Charles, suggesting that he should come to Winchester as soon as he could. James wrote to his son at Oxford:
I grieve to write what you will grieve to read; but I must tell you that we can no longer flatter ourselves with the least hope of having your dear valuable Aunt Jane restored to us. The symptoms which returned after the first four or five days at Wi
nchester have never subsided, and Mr. Lyford has candidly told us that her case is desperate. I need not say what a melancholy gloom this has cast over us all. Your Grandmamma has suffered much, but her affliction can be nothing to Cassandra’s. She will indeed need to be pitied. It is some consolation to know that our poor invalid has hitherto felt no very severe pain—which is rather an extraordinary circumstance in her complaint. I saw her on Tuesday and found her much altered, but composed and cheerful. She is well aware of her situation. Your mother has been there ever since Friday & returns not till all is over—how soon that may be we cannot say—Lyford said he saw no sign of immediate dissolution, but added that with such a pulse it was impossible for any person to last long, & indeed no one can wish that—an easy departure from this to a better world is all that we can pray for.1
Yet against all expectation she rallied again, and when Charles arrived he found “Dear Jane rather better.”2 He rode to Chawton on Henry’s horse, where it was Mrs. Austen who struck him as “very poorly.” Then he returned to Winchester on the top of the coach. 19 June: “Jane a little better. Saw her twice & in the evening for the last time in this world as I greatly fear, the Doctor having no hope of her final recovery.” He could not stay, and travelled sadly back to his difficult life in London; he had lost a wife and child, and now the sister he had loved since he could remember was being taken from him too.
The unexpected improvement in Jane’s condition allowed Mary Austen to go home to Steventon. “You have always been a kind sister to me, Mary,” lied Jane to her, thanking her for her nursing, and perhaps glad to see her go. But Cassandra and Mary were agreed that she would come back when needed; and on 13 June she returned to College Street. Mrs. Austen was sent optimistic bulletins, which she passed on to Anna. “I had a very comfortable acct of yr Aunt Jane this morning, she now sits up a little . . . she hoped to be well enough to see Mrs. Portal to day; your Mamma is there, (went yesterday by the Coach) which I am very glad of . . . Tales of My Landlord are at yr Uncle Franks, that is the 3 first are there, I am reading the 4th.” Jane would have liked the idea of her mother cheering herself with Scott’s Tales of My Landlord; to distract from grief and anxiety is a very proper function of the novel.
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