Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  We hear of Henry frequently visiting his mother at Chawton cottage in her latter days. She remained safely there after Edward secured his right to the Chawton estates, for which he had to pay out £15,000 to the family who challenged it; and from 1820 she was made more comfortable by an allowance of £100 from her sister-in-law Leigh-Perrot. Like so many hypochondriacs, Mrs. Austen turned out to be far tougher than her healthy friends. “Ah, my dear, you find me just where you left me— on the sofa,” she told her grandson James-Edward when he called to see her. “I sometimes think that God Almighty must have forgotten me; but I dare say He will come for me in His own good time.”10 She lived to be eighty-seven; her eyesight deteriorated badly, and during the last year she suffered continual pain and was mostly confined to her bed, nursed by Cassandra and Martha Lloyd; she died in January 1827, alert to the end. She had been a strong force in the family, a tough, self-confident and remarkable woman, not always on easy terms with her most brilliant child, whose genius she nevertheless helped to shape by her example as a writer of verse and her taste as a reader. She was buried in Chawton Churchyard, and a memorial plaque was put up in the church vestry by her children, Cassandra, Charles, Francis, Henry and Edward.

  Edward was never ill, but lived out his days calmly and comfortably at Godmersham, reaching the age of eighty-five, looked after by a daughter and a sister-in-law, and died in his sleep. His daughter Fanny, who had received so much good advice on love and marriage from her Aunt Jane, married at the age of twenty-seven a rich land-owning baronet, Sir Edward Knatchbull. The fact that he was a widower with six children meant she continued in the role she had filled since she was fifteen, mothering other people’s children, as well as producing nine of her own; and her diaries give the impression that she had to rely rather heavily on her Christian faith to cope with the demands life made on her. Her husband went into Parliament, so strongly conservative that he resigned his seat when he saw the Reform Bill coming, although coaxed back later. He was a fussy man with an obsessive fear of scandal; he twice sacked governesses who attracted the affections of the young men of the family, provoked his eldest daughter into eloping, and did not relent towards her for ten years.11 Money still multiplied in Kent, and Fanny’s eldest son was raised to the peerage as Lord Brabourne. In 1884 he produced the first edition of Jane Austen’s letters, but afterwards sold off and scattered many of the originals.

  Frank’s wife Mary was another poor animal, casualty of too much child-bearing; she died, like Edward’s Elizabeth, giving birth to her eleventh child at lodgings in Gosport in 1823. He chose his second wife prudently, as a companion and housekeeper, from within the safe circle of the family group: she was Martha Lloyd, lifelong friend and companion of his sisters, aged sixty-three. Martha agreed to marry him and take charge of his house and family; Frank’s children were displeased, and so was Mrs. Leigh-Perrot, at that stage thinking of leaving him her house, Scarlets. She changed her mind but instead gave him an immediate £10,000; a rather better arrangement for him, since it enabled him to buy his own, Portsdown House outside Portsmouth. Promotion came steadily: Rear-Admiral in 1830 and Knight Commander of the Bath in the last of William IV’s investitures; and Vice-Admiral in 1838.

  Charles, also pursuing his career in the navy, and as hard working and good hearted as any of the Austens, was dogged by misfortune and poverty. He married his dead wife’s sister in 1820, to general disapproval, and had a second family. For years he worked with the coastguard service in Cornwall; and when in 1826 he was given a command at sea again, returning to the West Indies Station, he was injured by a fall from a mast, and was again grounded for eight years. For three decades he remained a captain. Then in 1838 he got to sea once more, serving in the Mediterranean with his two sons, and was at last promoted to Rear-Admiral, only to die of cholera in Burma while commanding the East India Station, at the age of seventy-three. His bad luck persisted among some of his descendants; where all the other brothers’ families remained fixed in middle- or upper-class life, Charles’s son’s family sank through the social scale. Almost incredibly, one of his great-grandsons was reduced to driving a bread van, while another was a grocer’s assistant; only their sister, showing the spirit of her forebears, became a school teacher. In the fifth generation these Austens shook off England entirely: one emigrated to Argentina, another became a GI bride.12

  When Martha married Frank, Cassandra was left alone at Chawton cottage; and so she lived for another seventeen years, keeping herself busy with knitting, sewing and the garden.13 She had her nephew Edward Knight the younger at Chawton House, and sometimes visited Francis and Martha; and occasionally she would talk to nieces or great-nieces about Jane. In this way the story of the Devonshire admirer was given. A much more surprising remark was remembered by Frank’s daughter Catherine; Cassandra told her that “some of her [ Jane’s] letters, triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom, were most amusing.”14 Jane joking and triumphing is a vision so unlike the official family version—but also so believable— that you want to hear and see more; the letters are naturally not to be found.

  Cassandra had many years in which to consider what to do with the papers in her possession. Her niece Caroline gives a clear account of the fate of the letters: she “looked them over and burnt the greater part (as she told me), 2 or 3 years before her own death—She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces—but of those I have seen, several had portions cut out.”15 In this respect, we may regret her decision, but she was confident of doing her duty towards her sister; some of the letters she destroyed were written during periods of stress, some doubtless contained indiscreet, even rude remarks, and some she thought too personal. In her care and disposal of her sister’s other writings she was exemplary, given that no museum existed at the time which would have taken them. Of the three early notebooks, she left one to Charles, one to Francis and the third to James-Edward. The manuscript chapters of Persuasion and “the last manuscript” (Sanditon ) went to Anna Lefroy; Lady Susan to Fanny Knatchbull; and the Plan of a Novel and the “Opinions” to Charles.

  Two years before her death Cassandra sent a gift of £30 to Anne Sharp, something that was surely done with Jane’s wishes in mind.

  She would have been proud of her friend’s force of character, because by then Miss Sharp was successfully running her own school for girls in Everton, a suburb of Liverpool, installed in two handsome semi-detached villas with a view over the Mersey. There she retired, and lived until her death in 1853, known as “a clever, rather dominant woman, much thought of in Everton society of her day.”16

  One other aspect of Cassandra’s devotion to Jane’s intentions must be put on record. It is an odd story. Jane’s legacy of £50 to Eliza’s old servant and friend Madame Bigeon might have marked the end of the association between the French family and the English one, but it did not. In August 1822 Cassandra paid £10 to “Mr. Perigord” (surely a bank clerk’s mistake for Mrs. Perigord); and in 1824 Henry made three more such payments to Madame Bigeon’s daughter, totalling £35.17 At this point he was awaiting the settlement of his claim in the French courts, and hopeful of being awarded some part of Eliza’s fortune; after the failure of his case there were no more payments from him. But now Cassandra took over; by this time Madame Bigeon must have been dead, and ten guineas went to “Mrs. Perigord” from Cass’s account at Hoare’s Bank in August 1825. Four years later, in 1829, she again gave her £5, and from then on continued with steady payments for the next sixteen years, usually of £5 twice a year, but occasionally more; in 1843, for example, she gave her four payments.18 In the same year she wrote her will, asking Charles to continue to pay out of his inheritance from her “twenty pounds a year by quarterly payments . . . to Mrs. Mary Perigord now residing in Edward Street Portman Square during the term of her natural life.” 19 Whether this was all done in memory of the two women’s service to Eliza and her son, or whether they had actually lost some small savings in Henr
y’s bank failure is not possible to say; or whether Marie Perigord was a relentless petitioner or simply a pitiful figure. It remains that the French connection was kept up by Jane’s and Cassandra’s goodwill towards two women whose claims upon them were, on the face of it, so slight as to be easily ignored; that they, as the women of the family, perceived a need in those other women, and determined to meet it. Their brothers paid out money at different times to the SPCK and other Bible societies, the “distressed Irish” and the “Houseless poor”; Jane and Cassandra saw that Madame Bigeon and Madame Perigord were not forgotten.20

  Cassandra was remembered by a great-niece as “a pale, dark-eyed old lady, with a high arched nose and a kind smile, dressed in a long cloak and a large drawn bonnet, both made of black satin.”21 She died in March 1845, not at home but on a visit to Francis. He had just, at seventy, been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indian Station, and was preparing to sail; older people were not then thought unfit to work. He was a widower again—Martha had died in 1843, like her sister Mary—and was taking two daughters with him, together with one son as his chaplain and another as his flag-lieutenant: a large family party. Cassandra went to say goodbye to them. In all the business of preparation she was left alone at Portsdown House with Henry, and collapsed with a “seizure” in the head. It sounds like a stroke. Henry sent helplessly for their niece Caroline, who described the situation: “All the inmates had cleared out and were on board the vessel at Portsmouth when I got there. It was impossible for Uncle [Francis] to delay his departure. He came over to see his sister once— that was all he could do—I found Uncle Henry left in charge. My Uncle Charles joined us ere long.”22 Cassandra, clear in her mind in spite of the seizure, lingered for a week before she died.

  Her body was taken back to Chawton to be buried beside her mother. James-Edward, who had ridden across Hampshire for Jane’s funeral in 1817, arrived in his carriage for Cassandra’s in 1845. There were very few at the funeral, just two of her brothers, Charles and Henry, and three nephews. It was a fine, blustery March day, and “it struck me as remarkably emblematic of her age and condition that the wind whisked about us so many withered beech leaves, that the coffin was thickly strewn with them before the service closed,” wrote James-Edward to his sister Anna.23 Henry worked his usual charm: “he struck me as very agreeable and not very old”; and he departed almost literally in a puff of smoke, taking the night mail train for Leamington.

  With Cassandra’s death, Edward Knight and his family had no further use for Chawton cottage. The contents were sold off, and it was divided into tenements for labourers. So it remained for a century, until in 1940 Miss Dorothy Darnell founded the Jane Austen Society, its first object being to gain possession of the cottage. It still belonged to the Knight family, and the three tenants were paying two shillings and sixpence a week each; Major Edward Knight was prepared to sell the freehold, but only for a sum quite beyond the means of the newly founded Society: he asked £3,000. The war made everything difficult; fortunately two of the most distinguished authorities on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jenkins and R. W. Chapman, became involved. Chawton Village Library, which had been using one of the downstairs rooms in the cottage, gave way to the Society; an appeal in The Times in December 1946 raised £1,400; and in 1947 Thomas Edward Carpenter bought the freehold from the Knights with the intention of restoring it in memory of his son, killed in action in 1944. The roof was repaired, other accommodation was gradually offered to the families living in the cottage, and in July 1949 it was opened to the public. It seems entirely appropriate that this should have come about through Miss Darnell’s initiative, assisted and encouraged by her sister Beatrice, with whom she shared her life, rather than through any rich and powerful institution.

  Henry died suddenly in Tunbridge Wells in 1850. Francis lived another fifteen years, reaching the patriarchal age of ninety-one; by then he was Sir Francis Austen, and Admiral of the Fleet. He is the only brother of whom there is a photograph, and you can see what a good-looking man he was, with the alert Austen eyes, mouth firmly downturned and halo of springy white hair. He had kept Jane’s many letters most carefully through the fifty years since her death, but surprisingly failed to leave instructions as to what should be done with them; and his daughter Fanny, without consulting anyone else, destroyed the priceless bundles.24

  Jane Austen’s family, with all their remarkable energy, diversity and adventurousness, their power to interest and keep us entertained, would nevertheless have been forgotten without her. It is only because of her writing that we think them worth remembering; and yet she is at almost every point harder to summon up than any of them. She made no claims for herself, for a room of her own, for a place among the English novelists; even her appearance, as we have seen, is hard to visualize at all precisely. The family march towards us, brightly lit in their uniforms or sober in clerical black, surrounded by their children, worrying about wills, installed in fine houses; she is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky.

  She has a way of sending biographers away feeling that, as Lord David Cecil put it, she remains “as no doubt she would have wished— not an intimate but an acquaintance.”25 Her sharpness and refusal to suffer fools makes you fearful of intruding, misinterpreting, crassly misreading the evidence. Then there are the difficulties that arise from her being one of the few great writers who is popular outside academe as well as in. The critical literature runs to thousands of volumes and tens of thousands of articles, ranging from the brilliantly illuminating to the bizarre; getting through it all is not possible, when you consider that between 1952 and 1972 alone there were 551 books, essays and articles published, not to mention 85 doctoral dissertations.26 On the other side of the academic fence, many readers feel strongly that she is their personal property, not to be tampered with or subjected to questions and theories.

  This is nevertheless an attempt to tell the story of her life, and on the last page I must return to Jane Austen herself. To the child, for whom books were a refuge, offering a world that sometimes made better sense than the one she had to find her way about. To the girl whose imagination took off in startling directions as she began to see the possibilities of telling stories of her own. To the energetic young woman who loved dancing and jokes, and dreamt of a husband even as she apprenticed herself to novel writing with all the force of her intelligence. To the 25-year-old who decided she did not like people and could not write any more; and who was tempted to make a comfortable, loveless marriage, and put the temptation behind her. To the loving sister and aunt who always made time for her family even though she would sometimes have preferred to be left to think and write in peace. To the woman who befriended governesses and servants. To the published author in the glow of achievement and mastery of her art. To the dying woman with courage to resist death by writing in its very teeth. To the person who on occasion preferred to remain silent rather than cut across the views and habits of those she loved; and who kept notes of what people said about her work, to read over to herself. This is my favourite image of Jane Austen, laughing at the opinions of the world. It is lucky she had so much laughter in her; today, the volume of opinions has swelled to something so huge that they could be laughed at for ever.

  Appendix i

  A NOTE ON JANE AUSTEN’S LAST ILLNESS

  Two hundred years after her death, any diagnosis must be tentative. A carefully argued case was made in 1964 by Sir Zachary Cope that she was suffering from Addison’s disease, nowadays responsive to treatment, then incurable. He cited the skin discoloration she mentioned (“black & white & every wrong colour”), her bilious attacks and her deterioration under emotional stress, as when upset by her uncle’s will.

  Addison’s is a tuberculosis of the adrenal glands that produces vomiting and dehydration and skin discoloration, but it has other features which do not seem to fit what we know of Jane Austen’s case. The discoloration characteristic of Addison’s disease is in fact a tanned, healthy appearanc
e, the effect of increased production of melanin as the pituitary works harder to stimulate the adrenal glands destroyed by tuberculosis, which fail to produce cortisone. This overstimulation, coincidentally, leads to increased skin pigmentation. As a result, observers tend to comment on how well the patient looks; but no one observed such a thing in Jane Austen, and her niece Caroline particularly noted her pallor (“she was very pale”).

  Addison’s does not produce the recurrent fevers from which Jane Austen suffered. It does, on the other hand, lead to what is known as postural hypotension, meaning that the blood pressure drops when the patient stands up, causing sudden faintness and collapse on standing. This was not noted in Jane Austen’s case. Again, a steady progress of the disease would be expected with Addison’s, whereas her illness fluctuated between periods of improvement and deterioration.