To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  I shall close this letter at the end of the page, though this time I feel I ought to carry on, telling you that I love you, and that I am discontented and not happy without you. I want to be very very tender and gentle towards you – and, too, very rough. I want to sink into you, to merge with you, to be a part of you. You end one of your L.C.s with a French phrase I interpret (I never had French in my youth) as ‘I adore you my good friend’. Thank you. Please hold onto that idea, and for my sake, please hold onto me; let me in, and warm me.

  I love you.

  Chris

  Chapter Nine

  Why Jane Austen’s Letters Are so Dull (and Other Postal Problems Solved)

  It is February 1816, and Jane Austen, aged 40, is beginning to feel unwell. It is seventeen months before her death. One of her lasting and final pleasures, apart from work and the sedentary thrills of spillikins, is her friendship with her niece Fanny Knight, a relationship conducted primarily through letters. ‘You are inimitable, irresistible,’ Austen writes to her from her home in Chawton, Hampshire. ‘You are the delight of my life. Such letters, such entertaining letters, as you have lately sent! such a description of your queer little heart! such a lovely display of what imagination does. You are worth your weight in gold, or even in the new silver coinage.’

  Their correspondence continues until the end, and it is the first thing Cassandra Austen, Jane’s sister, refers to when she writes to Fanny directly after Jane’s death in July 1817.

  Winchester, Sunday.

  My dearest Fanny,

  Doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost. She did love you most sincerely, and never shall I forget the proofs of love you gave her during her illness in writing those kind, amusing letters at a time when I know your feelings would have dictated so different a style. Take the only reward I can give you in the assurance that your benevolent purpose was answered; you did contribute to her enjoyment.

  Even your last letter afforded pleasure. I merely cut the seal and gave it to her; she opened it and read it herself, afterwards she gave it to me to read, and then talked to me a little and not uncheerfully of its contents, but there was then a languor about her which prevented her taking the same interest in anything she had been used to do.

  The letter contains further details of Austen’s final day and the plans for ‘the last sad ceremony’ at Winchester Cathedral. But half a century later, in 1869, Fanny Knight (now Lady Knatchbull) did not have such reverential things to say about either of her aunts, recalling in a letter to her younger sister that Jane ‘was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent’ and that

  They [the Austen family] were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed were not all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre . . . Both the Aunts were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent . . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.

  Why so ungrateful? Victorian society had sharpened her standards and hardened her expectations, and perhaps dulled her memory and tact. But her condemnation does contain a telling phrase: ‘most complete ignorance of the World & its ways’. Sweeping as this assertion was, Fanny was not alone in finding this fault in the Austens, and there is no firmer evidence of it than in Jane Austen’s letters.

  Jane cross-writes to Cassandra in 1807. Good luck with that.

  For a writer whose novels are so steeped in epistolarity as Austen – characters are defined by letters, plots turn on them – it is startling to discover how damn dull so many of Austen’s own letters are. Taken in one sitting – some 160 surviving items in all, the majority to Cassandra – you can read a great many pages without finding any insight into their author, or even much to amuse or inform; their domesticity and apparent unworldliness (the thing of which her niece complained: only scant and disparaging mention of the wars raging in Europe, for instance, and no apparent care for industrial revolution at home) are disappointing to her biographers and general fans alike.

  In 1801, Jane Austen acknowledged a truth about letters that, if not exactly universal, is at least as true today as it was then, and as much of a cliché too: ‘I have now attained the true art of letter-writing,’ she wrote to Cassandra, ‘which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.’ To which one may ungenerously conclude that her conversations must have been more than a trifle on the dry side.

  Here’s an example from October 1808, written from her home in Southampton when she was 32. She had already composed a draft version of what was to become Sense and Sensibility (in letter form), although the final version would not appear for a further three years.

  My dear Cassandra,

  Edward and George came to us soon after seven on Saturday, very well, but very cold, having by choice travelled on the outside, and with no great coat but what Mr. Wise, the coachman, good-naturedly spared them of his, as they sat by his side. They were so much chilled when they arrived, that I was afraid they must have taken cold; but it does not seem at all the case; I never saw them looking better.

  They behave extremely well in every respect, showing quite as much feeling as one wishes to see, and on every occasion speaking of their father with the liveliest affection. His letter was read over by each of them yesterday, and with many tears; George sobbed aloud, Edward’s tears do not flow so easily; but as far as I can judge they are both very properly impressed by what has happened. Miss Lloyd, who is a more impartial judge than I can be, is exceedingly pleased with them.

  George is almost a new acquaintance to me, and I find him in a different way as engaging as Edward.

  ‘A note for Miss Bennet’: an engraving from an 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice.

  We do not want amusement: bilbocatch, at which George is indefatigable; spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed; and we mean to avail ourselves of our kind papa’s consideration, by not returning to Winchester till quite the evening of Wednesday.*

  Mrs. J. A. had not time to get them more than one suit of clothes; their others are making here, and though I do not believe Southampton is famous for tailoring, I hope it will prove itself better than Basingstoke. Edward has an old black coat, which will save his having a second new one; but I find that black pantaloons are considered by them as necessary, and of course one would not have them made uncomfortable by the want of what is usual on such occasions.

  Fanny’s letter was received with great pleasure yesterday, and her brother sends his thanks and will answer it soon. We all saw what she wrote, and were very much pleased with it.

  The letter continued, anticipating a forthcoming marriage of friends and a possible family move to Kent. And then:

  In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home, to which they [her nephews] were very attentive; but you will not expect to hear that they did not return to conundrums the moment it was over. Their aunt has written pleasantly of them, which was more than I hoped.

  While I write now, George is most industriously making and naming paper ships, at which he afterwards shoots with horse-chestnuts brought from Steventon on purpose; and Edward equally intent over the ‘Lake of Killarney’, twisting himself about in one of our great chairs . . . Our evening was equally agreeable in its way: I introduced Speculation, and it was so much approved that we hardly knew how to leave off . . .

  We have just had two hampers of apples from Kintbury, and the floor of our little garret is almost covered. Love to all.

  Yours very affectionately, J.A.

  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this letter or her others (apart from the examples
she ‘crossed’, writing first down the page in the usual way, before turning the page sideways and writing across it again, a thrifty, eye-straining scheme she refers to in Emma). She did write wittily, spitefully and gregariously at times, but these flashes are fleeting. (And these flashes enraged some as being unnecessarily cruel: E.M. Forster, a committed fan of Austen’s novels, found her letters loaded with ‘triviality, varied by touches of ill-breeding and of sententiousness . . . she has not enough subject-matter on which to exercise her powers’, while Austen herself was self-consciously apologetic about her outbursts in another letter to Cassandra: ‘I am forced to be abusive for want of a subject, having nothing really to say’.)

  It may be unfair to pick another example that shows Austen in a bad light when she writes so much that hardly throws a light on anything, but her comments from her Hampshire fireside on the casualties being reported in the Napoleonic Wars in May 1811 are narrow-minded at best: ‘How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!’ The same letter goes on to describe a visit to a woman ‘who is short and not quite straight, and cannot pronounce an R any better than her sisters’.

  Cool, dispassionate and occasionally heartless: that’s an unexpected combination. Her biographer David Nokes suggests that Austen’s letters reveal her to be one thing above others: an instinctive mistress of disguise. Even in her letters to Cassandra, where we would expect her to be most forthcoming, her ‘playful pose of sisterly confidence usually falls teasingly short of genuine self-exposure’.

  This is the main disappointment in her letters: we occasionally catch her artfulness but rarely her personality; ‘the real Jane Austen’ remains slippery and elusive, and provides little insight into either her mind or her working practices. Knowing what we do of the intricate sensibilities and rich psychological multi-layering of her novels, surely it isn’t unreasonable to hope for more? And how to explain why her fiction should play so irresistibly with letters and her real life should not?

  According to the brief author biography in his book What Matters in Jane Austen?, Professor John Mullan has taught Austen to university students for more than a quarter of a century. And according to his energetic and surprising book, he is evidently still highly energised by the subject. The book’s surprises lie in the originality of the approach that someone so academically steeped in her work can bring to bear on the novels, picking them apart with amusing thematic essays on sex, the weather, sex between sisters, money, and what characters say about the heroine when the heroine’s not there. It’s the sort of book that will inspire you to read all the novels again in order, to see what you missed.

  But the most surprising thing about the book is that there is hardly anything in it about letters. There is a small section on Robert Martin’s strategic misjudgement in proposing to Harriet Smith by letter in Emma, thus stirring the novel’s plot and giving Miss Smith ample time to mull things over and refuse him (had he just come out and asked her directly, she probably would have said yes). But that’s pretty much all we get on the subject. To rectify this absence I called on Professor Mullan one morning in his Bloomsbury office at University College London, and he began with a persuasive explanation that we may understand Austen best by first considering her literary forbears and the social context in which she wrote.

  Whatever else they were, Mullan observed, her letters were not written with publication in mind; she would have shuddered at the thought. But this was not the general eighteenth-century view of the literary world. Samuel Johnson argued that the likely publication of his letters was one reason why he put so little in them, while the likes of Pope and Swift wrote as if their private letters were destined for the printing press with the ink still dry. Austen wrote for her friends and family; Pope was perennially grandstanding. ‘Pope’s letters are fantastic,’ Mullan says, ‘but they are completely contrived. He did things like – he fell out with Joseph Addison. After he died, Pope thought, “God, I haven’t got a correspondence with Addison . . . ” So he got hold of a load of letters he’d written to other people and rewrote them to Addison, and fabricated this kind of literary correspondence. It was as if Ian McEwan had gone, “Oh God, I hadn’t been writing to Hilary Mantel, and now she’s gone and died. I’d better produce some Hilary Mantel letters!”’

  The key with Austen’s letters, then, is to remember that she is not writing as an author. ‘I think her letters are a very superior version of what many a person like her would have written about,’ Professor Mullan believes, ‘interspersed with little glitters of something Austenish. I think Cassandra is slightly resented by a lot of Jane Austen fans . . . because she totally shapes the main effluence of personality that we have. And Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra about what she thought she wanted to know about. “Mrs Blah Blah has done this, and the harvest has been got in and we’ve all had colds . . .”

  ‘The funny thing is, often – even though you can get her letters in a fantastically annotated edition which gives you biographical glosses on everybody – it’s amazing, with a typical letter by Austen chosen at random, how much of it we don’t understand. You know, “Mrs X has done this again . . .”, and Cassandra is reading it and going “Oh not again!” and we know nothing.’ And Professor Mullan emphasises that while some letters may seen inconsequential on the surface, their context – known to the recipient as well as Jane Austen herself – may reveal hidden values.

  We can probably trust what we read in Austen’s letters – their lack of theatre suggests an authenticity we have come to expect from daily domestic accounts. But do we dupe ourselves even here? Midway through our meeting, John Mullan scans his wall of shelves for a book about Samuel Richardson with a rewarding quote at the start of it. He reads:

  It has been so long said as to be commonly believed, that the true characters of men may be found in their letters, and that he who writes to his friend lays his heart open before him . . . But the truth is, that such were the simple friendships of the ‘Golden Age’, and are now the friendships only of children. Very few can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a distinct and continued view; and, certainly, what we hide from ourselves we do not show to our friends. There is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse.

  The quote is from Samuel Johnson’s Life of Pope from 1781, but is juxtaposed with another that the author sent to his friend Mrs Thrale a few years before: ‘In a man’s letter you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.’

  In Jane Austen’s novels we get both conflicting interpretations, often in the same chapter. Indeed, one encounters significant letters in almost every chapter, and so much do they become a part of the furniture that they form a vital character in themselves.

  The dutiful-cum-obsessive Austen website pemberley.com has gone so far as to list every significant appearance of a letter in Pride and Prejudice, including Caroline Bingley’s letter to Jane in Chapter 7, inviting her to come to Netherfield; Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth in Chapter 35, explaining his conduct; and Mr Collins to Mr Bennet in Chapter 57, advising against an Elizabeth/Darcy match. There are 18 other game-changers en route, and these are only the letters which are quoted from rather than just mentioned; to include the latter would take up a chapter in itself.

  Had she lived and published 20 years earlier, Austen’s novels might have consisted of letters and nothing else. Both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are thought to have begun as purely epistolary novels; her early work Lady Susan retained the form to posthumous publication. ‘At the end of the eighteenth century writing a novel in letters would have been instinctual,’ John Mulla
n suggests. ‘Almost every creative genre appeared in letters in the eighteenth century – travel writing, pornography, political controversy, philosophical writing, even poems take the form of epistles.’

  The unchallenged champion of the genre was Samuel Richardson, whose three largely unread great works of mid-eighteenth-century English literature – Pamela, Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison – were all crowd-pleasing epistolary fictions (to the point where they inspired parodies, most famously Henry Fielding’s Shamela.*)

  The tension in Clarissa derives from the unreliability of letters; we’re unsure whether to trust the heroine’s virtuous version of herself, and we read of letters being forged and going astray. Austen is similarly playful with the form, and uses letters both as an indicator of character and a symbol of intimate engagement. At the beginning of Emma, for example, Frank Churchill is judged solely by his writing skills: ‘For a few days, every morning visit in Highbury included some mention of the handsome letter Mrs. Weston had received. “I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill has written to Mrs. Weston? I understand it was a very handsome letter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life.”’

  One reason Churchill’s writing skills are tapped up early on is because the core of the novel is concerned with his clandestine correspondence from Ireland with Jane Fairfax. And it is this correspondence, later in the book, that entices Jane out to the post office in the rain, and puts her on the defensive with John Knightley, who cares little for Frank Churchill.