Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  2. CEA to Fanny Knight, 20 July 1817 (the letter is printed in all the complete editions of JA’s letters).

  3. From My Aunt Jane Austen, a Memoir by Caroline Austen, writing in 1867. Her remark is particularly notable since she knew Cassandra for nearly forty years.

  4. Entries in Fanny’s diary for 16 Sept. 1804, 11 Oct. 1804 and 29 July 1806, Kent County Archives U951 F24/1.

  5. Mary Berry visited Stoneleigh four years later, and described it as a “clumsy house.” She met several of the Leighs, and “Mr. Repton, planning future improvements; very probably . . . for the worse. They gave us the key to the park . . . If this park shows some signs of neglect, it is, at least, unspoiled by improvement.” Miss Berry’s Journal for 6 Oct. 1810 (3 vols., 1865), Vol. II, pp. 433–4.

  6. Just about every old building in this part of Southampton has long since been demolished, and even the ground plan has disappeared, so it is not possible to know exactly where the Austens’ house stood, only that the garden ended at the town wall.

  7. Nigel Nicolson, The World of Jane Austen (1991), p. 110.

  8. The novelist Mary Brunton, who visited Netley in 1815, made this objection in a letter.

  19

  A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

  1. Henry’s ownership of the box at the Pantheon Opera Theatre, or House, is the discovery of Clive Caplan, to whom I am indebted for the information. The Pantheon opened in 1772, was used by Covent Garden for four years after it burnt down in 1788, and was burnt down itself in 1792; it was rebuilt allegedly on the scale of La Scala, but was never successful, and was reduced to putting on “Italian burlettas and ballets,” according to Erroll Sherson in London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (1925).

  2. Eliza appears so little in the Steventon Austens’ records as to suggest a deliberate exclusion, either because of disapproval of her character and marriage to Henry, possibly also going back to the question mark over her parentage. Fanny Austen’s unpublished diaries, however, describe dinners, theatre-going and shopping trips in London with Henry and Eliza.

  3. Mr. Hill’s claim to fame was that he was the uncle of Robert Southey, who by now had abandoned the radical opinions of his youth and become a respectable writer with a government pension. JA read some of his works, but without much enthusiasm. She joked about Southey’s very popular Life of Nelson to Cass, saying she was tired of such lives and never read any, but would read this one if it mentioned her brother Frank (11 Oct. 1813). Later she approved his Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, although moderately, and to Alethea Bigg who was staying with the Herbert Hills: “parts of it suit me better than much that he has written before” (24 Jan. 1817). For Catherine’s wedding present, Jane stitched some pocket handkerchiefs and sent them with a rather limp four-line verse expressing the hope her friend would have no tears to shed but tears of joy; a better version, not sent, wished “Slight be her colds, and few her tears.” Both reproduced in Chapman’s Minor Works, pp. 446–7.

  4. Elizabeth’s mother, who survived her, had borne thirteen children, the last when she was thirty-seven; so Elizabeth must have been hoping she was nearing the end of her own child-bearing years.

  5. Fanny’s diary mentions a visit to them at Wanstead with her father the following Oct., so it is likely they were there until Christmas 1809.

  6. These are taken from the printed pages in Fanny Austen’s diary for the year. Mrs. Chute’s diaries have similar lists, renewed every year, sometimes with instructions for the steps. In 1810 we find contemporary references again: “Lord Wellington’s Waltz,” “Talavera Reel” and “The Fair African,” as well as theatrical names, “Elliston’s Caper” and “Catalini’s Wriggle.”

  7. These accounts are all that survive of a pocket-diary for 1807 owned by JA. The two pages are in the Pierpont Morgan Library.

  8. Fanny’s diary for Sunday, 9 July 1809, records the prayer reading in the library.

  20

  AT CHAWTON

  1. Mrs. Knight to Fanny Austen, 26 Oct. 1809, cited by Deirdre Le Faye, A Family Record, p. 161, from Lord Brabourne, The Letters of Jane Austen (2 vols., 1884), Vol. II, p. 364.

  2. According to Charles Vancouver’s 1815 General View of Agriculture of Hampshire there were 64 houses in Chawton, 65 families, 171 males and 201 females. Of the men, 61 were agricultural workers, 10 in trade and 301 “other.”

  3. Caroline Austen, My Aunt Jane Austen, a Memoir, pp. 3–4.

  4. The tradition derives from the Memoir, in which James-Edward Austen-Leigh writes on p. 16 that the sisters shared a bedroom “all their lives.” Caroline, however, writes of her “keeping to her room” when she was ill, which could indicate it was not shared at that point (My Aunt Jane Austen, p. 14).

  5. There is no doubt of this. Jane wrote in her letter to Cass of 3 Jan. 1801, à propos the departure from Steventon, “All the beds indeed that we shall want are to be removed, viz:—besides theirs, our own two.” Like just about everyone at that period, she shared a bed on occasion, with her mother, with Martha Lloyd, with her niece Fanny and no doubt with her sister too. Women shared beds with women servants, with children, with friends; just as men might share with total strangers at an inn.

  6. JA to Anna Austen, 28 Sept. 1814.

  7. James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 16. Fanny’s diary for the astronomy lecture, 12 June 1811. Margaret Wilson (on page 29 in Almost Another Sister) suggests the “astronomy” lecture in fact referred to Fanny’s emotional entanglements, since she nicknamed one of her young men Jupiter. Constance Hill, Jane Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends, p. 195, for the laughing with Anna and Cass’s response.

  8. Martha also collected medical information including alleged cures for everything from consumption, worms, sore lips and “pain in the side” to “Mad Dog Bite”; and some veterinary treatments. She made cosmetics too, including “Coral Tooth Powder” and two kinds of cold cream. Information from The Jane Austen Cookbook (1995) by Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye, p. 36.

  9. Mrs. Austen wrote to her newly married granddaughter Anna in 1814 about engaging a cook as follows: “As to a cook, I have to say Mrs. Frank Austen gives 10 guineas, I give only 8—hers is the hardest place, as they have a great wash every fortnight, we have very little washing.” Undated letter cited by Geoffrey Grigson in the TLS for 19 Aug. 1955.

  10. Anna’s daughter, Miss Lefroy, gave this account to Constance Hill, who prints it on p. 176 of her Jane Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends .

  11. CEA to Philadelphia Walter, now Mrs. Whitaker, 20 Mar. 1812, AP , p. 250.

  12. According to his own son, James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 12.

  13. See “Opinions of Mansfield Park” in Chapman’s Minor Works, p. 432. For Emma, Mr. and Mrs. James Austen gave a joint, and unfavourable, opinion: they “did not like it so well as either of the 3 others. Language different from the others; not so easily read.”

  14. The original manuscript of James’s poem to his sister is in the Fellows’ Library at Winchester College. I have used George Holbert Tucker’s transcription in his A Goodly Heritage, p. 113.

  Though quick & keen her mental eye

  Poor Nature’s foibles to descry

  And seemed for ever on the watch,

  Some traits of ridicule to catch,

  Yet not a word she ever pen’d

  Which hurt the feelings of a friend,

  And not one line she ever wrote

  Which dying she would wish to blot;

  But to her family alone

  Her real, genuine worth was known.

  Yes, they whose lot it was to prove

  Her Sisterly, her filial love,

  They saw her ready still to share

  The labours of domestic care

  As if their prejudice to shame

  Who, jealous of fair female fame,

  Maintain that literary taste

  In womans mind is much misplaced,

  Inflames their vanity & pride,

  And
draws from useful works aside.

  15. Fanny’s diary notes this, 4 May 1812. “Beautiful place,” she writes.

  16. James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 102.

  17. Jane Aiken Hodge makes this point in The Double Life of Jane Austen (1972).

  18. Jane Aiken Hodge points out that when the second edition was prepared in Nov. 1813, JA wrote, “I suppose in the meantime I shall owe dear Henry a great deal of money for printing &c.” The Double Life of Jane Austen, p. 120.

  19. Mary Brunton was three years younger than Jane, a Scotswoman and the author of Self-Control, published in 1810. Jane was trying to get hold of a copy in the spring of 1811, and said she was afraid of reading it for fear it would be too clever, and forestall her story and characters. When she did read it in Oct. 1813 her fears were relieved. Laura is one of the tribe of perfect heroines who resists first seduction and then the offer of marriage from the dashing Colonel Hargrave, and goes through many vicissitudes which culminate in America, where she makes a dramatic escape in an Indian canoe. It was successful, and is still worth reading for many incidental touches, like Laura’s appalled response to the noise and traffic of London and her humiliating efforts to sell her paintings to earn money. Mrs. Brunton died giving birth to her first child at the age of forty; she had been married at nineteen, and did not expect to survive the confinement, selecting her grave clothes in advance. The letter quoted was to her friend Mrs. Izett, given on p. xxxvi of her husband’s memoir, prefaced to her posthumous novel Emmeline (1819), a fervent tract against divorce.

  20. British Critic, May 1812, and Critical Review, Feb. 1812.

  21. Arthur Aspinall, The Letters of Princess Charlotte (1949), p. 26.

  22. Charles Austen gave this account of his conversation with “a nephew of Charles James Fox” in a letter to JA dated 6 May 1815. He was in Palermo;

  Fox was in the navy at this point, aged eighteen. Because he was born before his parents were able to marry (his mother was still married to her first husband) he could not succeed to the Holland barony or ever be legitimized. He gave up the navy, joined the army, and fell in love successively with two of the daughters of the Duke of Clarence and Mrs. Jordan; Eliza turned him down in favour of the Earl of Erroll, but Mary FitzClarence agreed to marry him in 1824. The whole of Charles Austen’s account, which is printed in J. H. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers, p. 270, goes like this: “Books became the subject of conversation, and I praised ‘Waverley’ highly, when a young man present observed that nothing had come out for years to be compared with ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Sense and Sensibility’ &c. As I am sure you must be anxious to know the name of a person of so much taste, I shall tell you it is Fox, a nephew of the late Charles James Fox. That you may not be too much elated at this morsel of praise, I shall add that he did not appear to like ‘Mansfield Park’ so well as the first two, in which, however, I believe he is singular.” So Charles Fox was a precursor of Kingsley Amis.

  23. Mrs. Anne Grant’s Letters from the Mountains, published in 1806 in three volumes, had a great success. They were written between 1773 and 1803, and published when she was left a widow by her clergyman husband, a garrison chaplain at Fort Augustus, with eight living children to support; the letters give an affecting picture of the births and deaths of many more in their remote cottage, halfway between Perth and Inverness. They farmed their patch of land, and spun and wove their own cloth. Her view of family life in these circumstances is well expressed (Vol. III, p. 165):

  A large family is a little community within itself. The variety of dispositions, the necessity of making occasional sacrifices of humour and inclination, and, at other times, resisting aggression or incroachment, when properly directed by an over-ruling mind, teach both firmness and flexibility, as the occasion may call forth the exercise of those qualities.— Respect and submission to the elder branches of a family, tenderness and forbearance to the younger, all tend more to moral improvement, if properly managed, than volumes of maxims and rules of conduct.— With regard to modesty and deference too, people in our situation must needs enforce those in self-defence.—In a cottage, where children are continually under the eye of their parents, and confined within narrow bounds, petulance would be purgatory.

  Mrs. Grant had spent her childhood in America, where her father was posted before the War of Independence (she returned to Scotland in 1768). She was an ardent Tory and wrote, “we detest the Rights of Man, and abominate those of Woman” (Apr. 1795, Vol. III, p. 231).

  21

  INSIDE MANSFIELD PARK

  1. This he wrote in his diaries. All information about d’Antraigues from the second edition of Léonce Pingaud, Un agent secret sous la R évolution et l’Empire: Le Comte d’Antraigues (Paris, 1894). Pingaud writes (p. 84), “Il ne faut malheureusement jamais ni nulle part chercher dans cette vie quelque chose qui soit absolument droit ou absolument pur.” (“There is unfortunately no point in looking for anything entirely straightforward or entirely disinterested in this particular life story.”)

  2. As Countess of Craven she read and enjoyed JA’s novels; JA noted her opinion of Emma: “Countess Craven—admired it very much, but did not think it equal to P & P.—which she ranked as the very first of it’s sort.”

  3. Francis Austen complained in 1844: “That I have not served at Sea since 1814 is not from want of inclination or application, but have had no influence of a political or family description to back my pretensions.” British Library Add. MSS 38,039, f. 184. He did, however, receive honours, CB in 1815, Rear-Admiral in 1830, and in 1837 he was invested as Knight Commander of the Bath by King William IV (as the Duke of Clarence became in 1830).

  4. For readers who do not remember the details of the book, Mansfield Park is the Northamptonshire country house of Sir Thomas Bertram, into which he invites Lady Bertram’s niece Fanny Price, the eldest daughter of a sister who married a mere lieutenant in the marines. Fanny is younger than the Bertram children, two sons and two daughters, Maria and Julia, both beauties, and she is taken very little notice of by any of them except the younger son, Edmund, who is kind to her and wins her love. She grows up shy and neglected, and tormented by her other aunt, Mrs. Norris, who lives near by. The central action begins when Sir Thomas has to travel to his estates in the West Indies, and Henry and Mary Crawford come to stay near Mansfield; they are brother and sister, delightful, witty and well-to-do. Soon both Julia and Maria, who is already engaged to a rich and foolish neighbour, Rushworth, are in love with Henry, who is happy to flirt with both; and Edmund is in love with Mary. She expects to marry an elder son, and turns up her nose at the idea of a clergyman, which is what Edmund plans to be. Two long sequences show the young people spending a day at Mr. Rushworth’s great house, and then hatching a plan to put on a play at Mansfield Park. Fanny alone opposes the play scheme; even Edmund is drawn in, and the cross-currents of feeling generated by these activities—jealousy, vanity, excitement and pain—are orchestrated with a masterly hand.

  Sir Thomas returns, the play is given up and Maria’s wedding to Rushworth goes ahead. Mary Crawford finds herself more drawn to Edmund than she meant to be, and Henry to Fanny. When Henry, baffled by Fanny’s indifference and impressed by her devotion to her sailor brother William, helps him to promotion and proposes to her, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram urge her to accept. She refuses, and Sir Thomas sends her to visit her parents in Portsmouth, whom she has not seen since she left them as a child, as a way of bringing her round. The Portsmouth scenes are the other high point of the book, and Austen’s fullest representation of poverty; the Prices live in a small house with thin walls and too many noisy children. Mrs. Price lacks any capacity to bring order, and Mr. Price drinks too much; neither is interested in Fanny. She pines, and Henry Crawford arrives and makes himself extremely agreeable to her by his tactful and charming behaviour. The reader is led to think Fanny will soften, he will mend his light-hearted ways and become a model estate-owner, and Edmund and Mary will m
arry. Instead, Austen introduces a flurry of activity, mostly reported, in which Henry elopes with Maria Rushworth, Julia also runs off with an admirer, and the eldest Bertram boy falls ill. The Bertrams send for Fanny, whom they now recognize as their only good “daughter”; and Mary Crawford loses Edmund by failing to condemn her brother’s behaviour. The way is open for Edmund to turn to Fanny at last, and on the last page of the book they are settled at the parsonage near his parents at Mansfield Park, while Mrs. Norris lives in remote banishment with the disgraced Maria, and the Crawfords disappear into the glittering and corrupt social round of London.

  5. Egerton’s remark and some of the others are taken from JA’s own list of “Opinions of Mansfield Park,” printed in Chapman’s Minor Works, pp. 431–5; others are from contemporary letters cited in Deirdre Le Faye, A Family Record, pp. 189–90. There were no reviews, but the first edition, again in three volumes (David Gilson’s estimate in The Jane Austen Handbook, p. 135, is 1,250 copies) at eighteen shillings, published in May 1814, sold out in six months. Profits for the author were £350.

  6. James-Edward sent this request in an anonymous note in Nov. 1814, when a second edition was being considered. It is cited by Deirdre Le Faye, A Family Record, p. 197.

  7. All from JA’s “Opinions of Mansfield Park,” Chapman’s Minor Works, pp. 431–5.

  8. This account of Cassandra’s reaction is taken from Elizabeth Jenkins’s address to the Jane Austen Society, “Some Notes on Background.” It is attributed to Louisa, née Austen (Edward’s daughter), who became Lady George Hill, and told it to Pamela Fitzgerald, who reported it in turn in a letter to Lord Carlyle: “Lady George says Miss Austen’s sister Cassandra tried to persuade her to alter the end of Mansfield Park and let Mr. Crawford marry Fanny Price. She remembers their arguing the matter but Miss Austen stood firmly and would not allow the change.” Jane Austen Society Report (1980).

  9. Reginald Farrer, “Jane Austen,” Quarterly Review, July 1917, quoted in Brian Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage , Vol. II (1987). Q. D. Leavis’s essay on Mansfield Park appeared in Scrutiny for Jan. 1942, pp. 272–94. She also put forward an unconvincing theory that JA used Lady Susan as the basis for Mansfield Park.