After John Murray printed a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816, Austen finally could afford to send Richard Crosby’s firm the ten pounds she had been paid thirteen years earlier for Susan, which was never published. Crosby returned it to her, and she went through the manuscript, changing the heroine’s name to Catherine. Austen had completed this novel in 1803. Since then she had matured as an author, so for the present, she told Fanny Knight, “Miss Catherine” would remain “upon the Shelve.”
Around this time, Austen started to feel ill with mysterious aches and pains. She told herself that nothing was wrong and worked on her newest novel, The Elliots. She might as well write: there was no time to be sick when others were dealing with real troubles. Her brother Charles, for instance, was unemployed and struggling to stay out of poverty. Charles had been chasing pirates in the Mediterranean Sea when the vessel he captained was shipwrecked. With Britain finally at peace, he would wait ten years for the navy to offer him another command. Charles was raising three motherless daughters, and the middle child, Harriet, suffered from raging headaches. Doctors were treating the little girl with doses of mercury, a toxic metal. “I hope Heaven in its mercy will take her soon. Her poor Father will be quite worn out by his feelings for her,” the child’s aunt Jane commented. (Harriet would defy her aunt’s cold-hearted wish and live for nearly fifty more years.)
Charles Austen would marry again in 1820, choosing his dead wife’s sister as his bride. He would remain in the navy and rise to the rank of rear admiral.
The other naval officer in the family saw his pay cut in half. Frank Austen had made some smart investments and hoped to weather the downturn without too much discomfort. But he had put some of his money into Henry’s bank, and in 1816, the bank collapsed. Henry had taken daring risks with his investors’ funds, which included thirteen pounds of Jane’s earnings from Mansfield Park. Such a big gamble was a mistake in this unsettled economic time, and he lost the money. His rich relatives—his brother Edward and uncle Leigh-Perrot—paid out large sums to cover his losses.
Henry’s charm melted his family’s anger, and those who could afford it helped him along financially. “My uncle had been living for some years past at considerable expense, but not more than might become the head of a flourishing bank,” wrote James’s daughter Caroline. For this reason, “no blame of personal extravagance was ever imputed to him.” Only the Leigh-Perrots refused to forgive him. Henry, cheerful by nature, decided that at last the time had come to be ordained a minister. By the end of the year, he was serving as a curate in Chawton.
Jane might have been content to ignore her health, but Cassandra worried about her. In May and June 1816, Cassandra took Jane to the spa town of Cheltenham. Waters from the mineral springs in Cheltenham, like those in Bath, could restore wellness—or so people thought. Every morning before breakfast, Jane walked to the local pump room and downed a pint of the foul-tasting water. She and Cassandra could only hope that the treatment helped.
Back at home, the sisters often cooked for Frank and his family. They entertained Frank’s children, and they kept an eye on Charles’s oldest girl, Cassy, who stayed for months at a time with her grandmother and aunts. “Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb,” Jane complained to Cassandra. She wrote anyway, despite the turmoil and a painful back, and inscribed “Finis” on the final page of The Elliots on July 18, 1816. Something about the novel’s ending bothered her, though, so she rewrote the last two chapters.
And she insisted that she was getting better. In January 1817, she claimed to be “stronger than I was half a year ago.” She informed Alethea Bigg that the problem was “Bile,” but she told her niece Fanny that she was bothered by rheumatism, which was almost better, “just a little pain in my knee now & then.” She was also “recovering my Looks a little, which have been bad enough, black & white & every wrong colour.” Jane Austen fought hard against being ill, believing that “Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life.” She was forty-one years old.
Frank Austen attained the highest rank in the Royal Navy, admiral of the fleet, and was knighted by King William IV in 1837.
She hated being treated like an invalid, too. If she felt tired after dinner, she lined up three parlor chairs and lay across the seats, leaving the sofa for her mother, who sometimes napped there. The chair arrangement “never looked comfortable,” Caroline Austen said. “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.”
Austen began another novel, one she called The Brothers. It concerned three or four families, the mix of characters she liked best. Instead of living in a country village, they inhabited Sanditon, an up-and-coming seaside resort. She had written twelve chapters by March, but then she put the manuscript aside, feeling too ill to write anything longer than a letter.
This sounds like the behavior of a very sick woman. Yet when her uncle Leigh-Perrot died, on March 28, at age eighty-two, Jane insisted that Cassandra leave her and go to Berkshire, to be with their newly widowed aunt. All the Austens waited eagerly to learn the contents of the old man’s will, but its reading let them down. Mr. Leigh-Perrot left six thousand pounds in a trust fund for James, the oldest of the Austen brothers. He left a thousand pounds to each of his other nephews and nieces (except the disabled George), but this money was to be disbursed at the time of their aunt’s death. They had expected much more, and certainly, as the dead man’s sister, Jane’s mother had counted on getting some money to live on. She received nothing. Jane took a turn for the worse and blamed it on this distressing news. She summoned Cassandra home.
Caroline and Anna called at Chawton Cottage around this time. When they entered their aunt Jane’s room, they saw her wearing a dressing gown and seated “quite like an invalide in an arm chair,” Caroline reported. “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.” Her nieces kept the visit short, because Austen was too weak to talk. “I do not suppose we stayed a quarter of an hour; and I never saw Aunt Jane again,” Caroline said.
Jane was so sick in April, with a fever and “discharge,” that her alarmed family brought in Mr. Lyford, a surgeon from Winchester. This medical man applied treatments that Jane said “gradually removed the Evil.” She knew that her condition was grave, though. Secretly, on April 27, she wrote a will, bequeathing “to my dearest Sister Cassandra Elizabeth everything of which I may die possessed, or which may be hereafter due to me.” Funeral expenses were to be deducted from the total as well as fifty pounds for her beloved brother Henry and fifty more for Madame Bigeon, a longtime servant in Henry’s home. Madame Bigeon had looked after young Hastings, nursed Eliza in her final illness, and lost her savings when Henry’s bank fell.
Jane Austen drafted her will secretly, leaving almost everything she possessed to Cassandra.
No longer fighting the notion of being sick, Jane agreed to go to Winchester to be under Lyford’s constant care. James and Mary Lloyd Austen loaned her their carriage. “Now, that’s the sort of thing which Mrs. J. Austen does in the kindest manner!” Jane said. “But still,” she added, “she is in the main not a liberal-minded Woman.” She had never warmed to James’s second wife.
Jane and Cassandra left Chawton on May 24, a rainy day. Henry Austen and a nephew, William Knight, traveled beside the carriage on horseback, and Jane worried about them getting wet. She felt grateful for her family’s attention. “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,” she wrote in a letter to Anne Sharp. “Sick or Well, beleive me ever yr attached friend.” Sharp kept this letter close to her heart for the rest of her life.
What ailed Jane Austen?
Doctors and historians can only guess. One condition that fits her symptoms is Addison’s disease, possibly brought on by tuberculosis. In Addison’s disease, the adrenal glands produce too little of certain hormones that the body needs to function. Patients feel weak and tired, fevers come and go, and dark blotches appear on the skin. People with Addison’s disease feel some aches, especially in the lower back, but the pain is milder than that of cancer. Today, patients take medication to replace the missing hormones, but in Austen’s time their condition had no name and no treatment. Doctors had no tests to detect the “Addisonian crisis”—the lethal combination of low blood pressure, a low blood level of sugar, and a high blood level of potassium—that took the patient’s life. It is possible, however, that Austen had a different illness. Some medical detectives have suggested that she suffered from uncomplicated tuberculosis or lymphoma (cancer beginning in the lymph nodes).
In Winchester, the sisters rented rooms one floor above street level at Number 8, College Street. From their bow window, they looked out on the old city wall. Jane told Cassandra that she was getting better, and to prove it she walked from room to room. Cassandra saw things differently, and wrote to Mary Lloyd Austen in Steventon, asking her to come and help with Jane’s care. Mary arrived on June 6, a Friday.
Mary Austen kept a diary, and on Sunday, June 8, she noted that she “stay’d with Jane whilst Cass went to Church.” On Monday, she wrote, “Jane Austen worse I sat up with her.” And on Tuesday, “Jane in great danger.” News of Jane’s decline reached the rest of the family. “We can no longer flatter ourselves with the least hope of having your dear valuable Aunt Jane restored to us,” James Austen wrote to his son, then a student at Oxford. “Your grandmamma has suffered much; but her affliction can be nothing to Cassandra’s.”
Then Jane surprised them all and seemed to rally. Mary, no longer needed, went home, but within days, she came back. Cassandra and Jane required her help again.
nine
LASTING WORDS
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
—EMMA
ON JULY 15, St. Swithin’s Day, the women on College Street woke up to rain. According to English tradition, rain on this date means that wet weather will linger for forty days. On this particular July 15, the people of Winchester hoped for sun, because they had scheduled a day of races. In her mind, Jane composed a poem, imagining Saint Swithin cursing Winchester’s citizens for holding races on his special day. Too weak to hold a pen, she recited the verses aloud, and Cassandra wrote them down:
These races & revels & dissolute measures
With which you’re debasing a neighbouring Plain
Let them stand—you shall meet with your curse in your pleasures
Set off for your course, I’ll pursue with my rain.
Inventing this poem used up the last drops of Jane’s strength. She grew weaker and sicker, until on the afternoon of July 17, Lyford gave her something strong to ease her pain. It was the end; she died in her sisters arms before the next sunrise. On July 18, Mary wrote in her diary, “Jane breathed her last 1/2 after four in the Morn.”
Cassandra closed the eyes of the sister who had been her best friend. “She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow,” Cassandra mourned; “it is as if I had lost a part of myself.” For six days, the body lay in its open coffin in one of the College Street rooms. On July 24, Jane Austen was buried in a brick-lined vault in Winchester Cathedral, the city’s ancient, historic church. Three of Jane’s brothers—Henry, Edward, and Francis—and one of her nephews—James Edward—attended.
Illness kept James in Steventon, but he penned a rhyming tribute to the sister he had lost:
In her (rare union) were combined
A fair form & a fairer mind;
Hers, Fancy quick & clear good sense
And wit which never gave offence...
Jane Austen was laid to rest within Winchester Cathedral.
James claimed that his sister always used her wit kindly, but he may have been less than honest. A few lines later, he contradicted himself by mentioning Jane’s “quick & keen ... mental eye,” which “seemed for ever on the watch, / Some traits of ridicule to catch.”
The Reverend Henry Austen wrote the inscription carved in his sister’s black marble gravestone. He praised “the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind,” but he mentioned nothing about her writing. Henry, like the rest of his family, had no idea that with her novels, Jane had placed herself among the world’s great writers.
Henry lost the letters he received from Jane, or possibly he destroyed them, just as Cassandra burned so many of hers. Frank Austen carefully saved his letters from Jane, but when he died in 1865, his daughter Frances threw them away. Jane Austen wrote about three thousand letters, but only one hundred sixty survive.
She also completed two novels that were unpublished at the time of her death. They appeared in print together in December 1817. The first was Catherine (formerly Susan), which had come off the shelf and had a new title, Northanger Abbey. Completed in 1803, it brings to mind the broad humor of Austen’s Juvenilia as it spoofs the gothic novels that were popular when she was young.
Its heroine, Catherine Morland, is an unlikely one, the daughter of a respectable clergyman with a good income and his sensible wife. Catherine’s father is “not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters,” and her mother, rather than dying in childbirth “as anybody might expect,” lives on. “Almost pretty” at seventeen, Catherine is an ordinary girl.
Her life becomes an adventure when a neighbor couple, the Allens, take Catherine to Bath. There, at a ball, she dances with “a very gentleman-like” young clergyman named Henry Tilney. The next day, she meets Isabella Thorpe, the daughter of Mrs. Allen’s old friend. The two girls quickly become close companions. They share a taste for gothic romances, and Catherine reads The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Isabella praises. This novel by Ann Radcliffe focuses on a beautiful orphan who has frightening experiences in a foreign castle.
Women find thrills In a gothic novel In 1802.
Catherine hopes to see Henry Tilney again, but Isabella’s tiresome brother, John, gets in the way. John has formed the mistaken idea that Catherine is an heiress, and he is determined to court her. Catherine at last speaks with Henry and meets his sister, Eleanor, and his father, General Tilney. Calling Catherine “the finest girl in Bath,” the general invites her to stay with his family at their home, Northanger Abbey.
Northanger Abbey! The name makes Catherine imagine “a fine old place, just like what one reads about,” a spot like the castle of Udolpho. She thinks of dim, gloomy passages; hidden doorways; and rooms that have been closed since their inhabitants’ deaths. When she sees Northanger Abbey’s modern furnishings and brightly lit rooms, she is disappointed.
John Murray published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion together in a four-volume set dated 1818, although the books were printed in December 1817.
Her bed chamber is clean and sunny, but an antique chest promises to hold forbidden secrets. Curiosity impels Catherine to raise its lid, and she discovers—a spare counterpane, or bedspread. Catherine’s fancy targets General Tilney, and she con jures up “the blackest suspicions” that he murdered his wife. The hunt for clues leads her to the late Mrs. Tilney’s room, where Henry catches her snooping. “Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained,” Henry chides, and Catherine, embarrassed, hurries to her room in tears.
This is the painful lesson in self-knowledge that causes Catherine to grow: “The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. Henry’s address, short as it had been, had more thoroughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies than all their several disappointments had done.”
There is a surprise in store for Catherine at Northanger Abbey, but it is nothing she could have imagined. General Ti
lney returns from a week in London and orders her to leave, offering no explanation. A perplexed Catherine journeys home alone and reaches her family safely. The reason for the general’s unexpected anger becomes clear when Henry pays a call. He explains that in Bath, General Tilney had learned from Isabella’s brother, John Thorpe, that Catherine was to inherit a great deal of money, and the general had picked Catherine out as a wife for Henry. Then, in London, John Thorpe had told General Tilney a different story, that Catherine was penniless.
Stylish Britons stroll outside Bath’s pump room In 1804.
Catherine, in truth, is neither rich nor poor, and Henry asks for her hand in marriage. The Morlands give their permission on the condition that General Tilney agrees to the match. Fortunately for Catherine and Henry, Eleanor Tilney marries a viscount, “a man of fortune and consequence,” and the general feels happy and forgiving. He grants Henry permission “to be a fool if he liked it!”
Northanger Abbey is Catherine Morland’s story, but it is a book about novels and reading as well. Austen may poke fun at thrillers like The Mysteries of Udolpho, which were written for popular entertainment, but in Northanger Abbey she also defends the novel as an art form:
There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.... “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!”...or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
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