Jane Austen

by Catherine Reef

  Sometimes carriages brought guests. In May 1779, the Austens had a visit from Thomas Knight, a wealthy cousin of George Austen, and his wife, Catherine. Enchanted by young Edward’s good looks and friendly ways, the Knights invited the boy to join them on their summer travels. Edward’s parents, who were soon to have another child, permitted him to go. They consented again several years later, when the childless Knights offered to adopt Edward and make him their heir. Thomas Knight had a responsibility to take care of the property he had inherited and pass it along to a worthy successor. He also felt obligated to prevent his family line from dying out. He achieved both goals by adopting Edward. For the Austens, the chance for Edward to inherit a large estate was too great to pass up. The adoption took place when Edward was sixteen. It meant that he would live with the Knights at Godmersham Park, their splendid house in the county of Kent, and change his name to Knight one day. He would remain close to the family at Steventon, though.

  This silhouette commemorates the formal presentation of Edward Austen to the family of Thomas Knight, his adoptive father. Silhouettes, either painted or cut from paper, were a popular way to record events and make portraits before the invention of photography.

  Charles, the baby of the Austen family, was born in June 1779. Two weeks later, fourteen-year-old James left home to enter St. John’s College in the city of Oxford. He had received a scholarship because his mother was distantly related to the college’s founder, Sir Thomas White. James was young, but not unusually young, for someone starting college. Boys had been known to go to Oxford as early as age twelve, and James’s own father had entered St. John’s College in the year he turned sixteen. There was no standard system of education in James’s day, so students went to Oxford when they were academically ready.

  James came home for holidays, and at Christmas 1782, when Jane was just seven years old, he put on a play with his brothers and their friends the Fowle boys. The English people of Jane Austen’s time loved anything to do with the stage. More plays were written in England in the 1700s than in any other century. Thousands of men and women flocked to Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and London’s other popular theaters. People read plays for entertainment, and they acted them out at home for fun.

  Jane Austen lived in the Georgian period, which lasted from 1714 until 1830. During these years, four kings named George—George I, George II, George III, and George IV—sat on the English throne. England rose to be a world power, despite losing its North American colonies. It was a fruitful time, when Defoe, Fielding, Scott—and Austen—gave the world their novels. George Frideric Handel, who adopted England as his home, composed the Messiah and other great pieces of music. The British people of this period are referred to as Georgians.

  A crowd cheers the actors at the Drury Lane Theatre, one of London’s leading playhouses, in 1821.

  That Christmas, James and the other boys performed Matilda, a rip-roaring drama set during the long-ago reign of William the Conqueror, when knights did battle in armor and “Tilts and Tournaments call’d forth the Brave.” Brothers Edwin and Morcar duel for the beautiful Matilda, whom Morcar holds prisoner.

  Neighbors gathered in the Austens’ barn to see the play. As the other actors took their places on the stage, Edward stepped forward to recite a prologue written by James. The actors hoped, he said,

  To speak with elegance, & act with ease,

  To fill the softened soul with grief sincere

  And draw from Pity’s eye the tender tear.

  Soon afterward, in 1783, their parents scraped up the money needed to send Jane and Cassandra away to school. At seven, Jane was really too young to leave home, but she insisted on doing whatever ten-year-old Cassandra did. As her mother explained, “If Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off, then Jane would have her’s [sic] cut off too.”

  Parents who enrolled their daughters in school wanted them to come home “accomplished.” Boys studied classical languages, history, mathematics, and science. Girls learned a little grammar and geography, but mostly they practiced penmanship and other ladylike skills. Women who could paint or do needlework filled empty hours and beautified their homes. Those who spoke French and knew how to dance or play an instrument mingled well in society.

  Many people agreed with Jonathan Swift, who wrote that “reading books, except those of devotion or housewifery, is apt to turn a woman’s brain.” She would “learn scholastic words [and] make herself ridiculous by pronouncing them wrong, and applying them absurdly in all companies.” Swift was a master of satire who often created humor by exaggerating popular opinions.

  No laws required children to go to school, and none governed the operation of schools. Any woman needing to earn a living could open a boarding school for girls. Some of these schools were good, but others seemed designed to halt children’s growth and ruin their health. Schoolmistresses who feared poverty fed their pupils meager meals of the cheapest food they could buy. Girls in their care slept two to a bed, which spread disease, and they rarely played outdoors. (Of course, life was brutal at some boys’ schools as well.)

  It is hard to understand why caring parents would send their children to such dreadful places. Most likely, many fathers and mothers had no idea how terrible conditions were. But people believed that hardship was good for children, that it toughened them and made them better fit for life.

  Jane, Cassandra, and their cousin Jane Cooper went to a school run by a woman named Mrs. Cawley, in her Oxford home. When summer came, Mrs. Cawley took her pupils to the southern port of Southampton, just as a “putrid fever”—possibly typhoid or diphtheria—spread through that city. Jane, Cassandra, and Jane Cooper all fell ill. For a time their parents thought that everything was fine, because Mrs. Cawley had forbidden the girls to send letters home. Then plucky Jane Cooper disobeyed and sneaked out a letter to her mother—possibly saving her cousin Jane’s life by doing so. Mrs. Cooper and her sister, Mrs. Austen, hurried to Southampton to find Jane Austen on the brink of death.

  The little girl improved under her mother’s constant care, and as soon as she was well enough to travel, the two women took their daughters home. But Mrs. Cooper had been infected, and she died soon afterward. From then on, Jane Cooper was often at Steventon.

  The three girls briefly attended a better school, beginning in 1785. At least the pupils played outdoors, and there was plenty of bread and butter for breakfast. The headmistress, an Englishwoman who called herself Madame La Tournelle, hurried through her pupils’ lessons so that she could talk to them about her favorite subject, actors. Jane, Jane Cooper, and Cassandra returned to Steventon in 1786 and had no more formal education. As young as she was, Jane Austen had seen enough of girls’ schools to form a strong dislike of them, and she never changed her mind. She later described them as places “where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity.” At home, she read freely, and her parents hired a piano master to give her lessons. Playing the piano became one of Jane Austen’s accomplishments, one that would give her pleasure throughout life.

  Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, shows off her noble profile. After her sister’s death, she gave motherly attention to her niece Jane Cooper.

  Being home meant being on hand when the boys put on more plays. These shows were most fun to watch when captivating Cousin Eliza joined the cast. Eliza was the daughter of Aunt Philadelphia, the Reverend Austen’s older sister, who as a young woman had sailed to India in search of a husband. English wives were in demand among the men employed by the British East India Company, the large firm that traded for Asian goods. Philadelphia Austen married Tysoe Hancock, the company surgeon, in 1753, and Eliza was born in 1761.

  Hancock died when Eliza was thirteen, and from then on her godfather looked after her welfare. Warren Hastings, governor general of Bengal, was a powerful man in India. He was a rich one, too, and placed ten thousand pounds in trust for the fatherless girl. This was a large sum of money in the eighteenth
century. The Reverend Austen earned a couple of hundred pounds a year, at most, as a clergyman. He, in turn, was much better off than a teacher in a London charity school, who received thirty-six pounds a year and lodging, or a serving man, who felt lucky to get twenty pounds plus room and board.

  Philadelphia Hancock took Eliza to France, where they attended balls with the king and queen, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. At nineteen, Eliza married a French nobleman, Count Jean-François Capot de Feuillide. The count was attracted to Eliza’s income as well as her charms, because he needed cash for a big project, draining the swamplands on his estate. He greatly admired England, so when Eliza became pregnant, he decided that the child should be born on English soil and grow up as a native of the British Isles. He, of course, was too busy with his drainage scheme to make the trip. So, “notwithstanding my reluctance to quitting home in my present situation, & my still greater regret at separation from the Comte [Count] de feuillide at a period when I could the most have wished for his presence, I purpose setting out on this long projected journey” Eliza wrote to an English cousin.

  Eliza traveled to England with her mother for the birth, but the baby arrived early, in June 1786, before the women reached their destination. Eliza named the boy Hastings, for the godfather who had treated her so generously. She was in England in 1789, when the French Revolution began.

  Although fond of both Austen sisters, Eliza confessed that “still My Heart gives the preference to Jane.” Jane admired this grown-up cousin who wore French fashions, flirted playfully with Henry and James, and was so knowing and accomplished. Eliza broadened the younger girl’s world by telling her about France and the famous people she had met there. She encouraged Jane to read French with a gift of children’s books printed in that language. When she sat at the piano and played, she taught Jane to love music as she did.

  Eliza resembled characters in the many novels Jane devoured. “If a book is well written, I always find it too short,” Jane wrote. As a child, she was already honing her taste in books. She found a lifelong favorite when she read Sir Charles Grandison, a hefty novel by Samuel Richardson. Sir Charles Grandison is an epistolary novel, one written in the form of letters. It tells of a virtuous gentleman torn between his love for an English heiress and his obligation to marry an Italian noblewoman. Jane read and reread Richardson’s book, and she even wrote a play based on it. Years later, a nephew recalled that “every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done ... was familiar to her.”

  Cecilia, by Fanny Burney, was another popular novel that Jane liked. It follows the adventures of Cecilia Beverley, age twenty-one. In order to receive an inheritance, Cecilia must marry a man who agrees to take her name. This stipulation causes all kinds of upset, leading one character to commit suicide and another to have a stroke. Cecilia, meanwhile, loses most of her money to creditors and becomes temporarily insane. “The whole of this unfortunate business,” a character concludes, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE.”

  A number of women were writing novels and plays. Some, like Fanny Burney, looked with humor at the way English aristocrats lived. Hannah Cowley wrote lighthearted plays in which lovers scheme and surmount obstacles to marry happily in the end. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels, filled with decaying castles, ghostly touches, and heroines in danger, kept young women of the upper and middle classes from falling asleep at night. Jane discovered spirited, realistic female characters in Belinda and other novels by Maria Edgeworth. She encountered a hero and heroine ruled by abundant feeling, or sensibility, in Charlotte Turner Smiths Celestina.

  It was one thing for a woman to pursue writing as an accomplishment and another for her to see her name in print. Some women boldly signed their names to their writing, but many people thought that a proper lady avoided public attention. Mary Brunton, who published her novel Self-Control anonymously, preferred to “glide through the world unknown” rather than “be suspected of literary airs.” Brunton said, “I would sooner exhibit as a rope-dancer” than be known as the author of a book.

  Then there was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who took credit for a controversial book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,” Wollstonecraft wrote; women “are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species.” The nonconforming Wollstonecraft had famous men as lovers, bore a child out of wedlock, and married an outspoken atheist. She stirred debate about whether women should write for publication and what they should write if they did.

  Young Jane Austen knew what she liked in a novel, and she laughed at what she deplored. When James and Henry briefly published a journal called The Loiterer, they received a humorous letter from a female reader calling herself “Sophia Sentiment.” Miss Sentiment had written to complain, because the stories in The Loiterer contained “not one Eastern Tale full of Bashas [pashas, or Turkish officials] and Hermits, Pyramids and Mosques.” One particular story had “no love, and no lady in it, at least no young lady.” She asked to see “some nice affecting stories, relating to the misfortunes of two lovers, who died suddenly, just as they were going to church.” There is no proof, but some scholars think Sophia Sentiment was thirteen-year-old Jane Austen.

  Jane also wrote stories of her own. She dedicated one, Love and Freindship (Austen’s spelling), to Eliza de Feuillide. This brief epistolary novel finds dark humor in carriage crashes, thievery, and elopements. Its two heroines, Laura and Sophia, are constantly fainting, until Sophia swoons once too often and falls on the dewy grass, catching a fatal chill. “Beware of fainting-fits,” she warns her friend. “Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreable, yet believe me they will, in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your constitution.”

  Written in 1790, when she was fourteen, Love and Freindship is one of Jane Austen’s early works, which together are called the Juvenilia. Between roughly 1787, when she was eleven, and 1793, the year she turned eighteen, Austen composed stories, dramatic scenes, short novels, and an imaginative account of the history of England. She copied the ones she liked best into three slender notebooks. Writing to entertain her family, the young Jane Austen made fun of social customs and the startling events that happened all too often in novels. Already she was setting herself apart from society and acting as an ironic observer.

  Cassandra illustrated one of Jane’s juvenile works, “The History of England.”

  An older cousin, another woman with the odd name Philadelphia, noticed young Jane taking on airs. Philadelphia Walter, who was as sweet as vinegar, met the Austen girls in 1788, when they visited relatives in the southeastern county of Kent. Watching Jane across a dinner table, Walter saw a girl who appeared “not at all pretty & very prim,” as well as “whimsical & affected.” Jane, a bright adolescent, was showing off her cleverness in company. Walter preferred Cassandra and called her pretty. She saw a strong resemblance between Cassandra and herself, but Cassandra, Walter noted, “was not so well pleased with the comparison.”

  Jane set another short novel, Jack and Alice, in the village of Pammydiddle. This fictional place is home to drunkards, gamblers, and “envious, spiteful, and malicious” young women. It was also home to wealthy Charles Adams, a man “of so dazzling a beauty that none but eagles could look him in the face.” Adams sets a steel trap to catch by the leg any woman who approaches his house with marriage on her mind.

  The young author dedicated Jack and Alice to “Francis William Austen Esqr”—her brother Frank. A graduate of the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth, Frank sailed to the East Indies at fourteen on the frigate Perseverance. He would spend five years away from his family. In his parting words to his son, the Reverend Austen reminded Frank that his behavior toward others would affect his success: “You may either by a contemptuous, unkind and selfish manner create disgust and dislike; or by affability, good humour and compliance, become the object of esteem and
affection.”

  As Frank set sail, the other Austen brothers were getting on with their lives. Charles followed Frank into the naval school. James completed his studies and became a clergyman, like his father. In March 1792, he married beautiful Anne Mathew, the daughter of a general who gave her a yearly allowance of one hundred pounds. The newlyweds settled into the parsonage at Deane, where James took over the churchly duties. Their daughter, Anna, was born in April 1793. In later years, Mrs. Austen liked to tell of being called from her bed in the middle of the night and trudging to Deane through the early spring mud to help deliver her granddaughter.

  Jane Austen’s oldest brother, James, followed his father into the church.

  Edward married, too. His bride, Elizabeth Bridges, was a baronet’s daughter. Edward lacked a title, but he was going to inherit wealth, mostly in the form of land and houses. For this reason, he made a good match for Elizabeth. Edward and Elizabeth also had a child in 1793, a girl named Fanny. Henry Austen grew to be more than six feet tall and started college in Oxford on a founder’s scholarship, like James. His parents wanted him to be a clergyman, too, but in February 1793, England went to war with France. Henry left college and rushed to join the Oxford militia. By early 1794, he was guarding French prisoners at Portsmouth. “Oh, what a Henry!” was all Jane could say about this impulsive brother.