by Jane Austen
Henry Austen noted that his sister’s ‘favourite moral writer’ in prose was Samuel Johnson; their lives overlapped by nine years.46 Unlike the figure of Pope, that of Johnson bulks as large at the biographical level as he does at the level of style, and several characters in the teenage writings bear his surname (in ‘A Tour through Wales’, the character Elizabeth Johnson is named after his wife). In his lifetime and for decades thereafter, partly thanks to the continuing popularity of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), this towering author was both praised and attacked for the gravity, symmetry, and parallelism of his writing, as exemplified in a sentence from Rambler no. 29: ‘Evil is uncertain in the same degree as good, and for the reason that we ought not to hope too securely, we ought not to fear with too much dejection.’47 Each member of the antithetical pair (evil / good; hope / fear) is equally weighted. As a result, the assertion feels at once succinct and comprehensive, like an aphorism, and in its general yet sympathetic handling of human nature it possesses dignity and solemnity. These unmistakable stylistic features—which Johnson himself was capable of spoofing—are parodied in Austen’s description of Lady Williams (‘Jack & Alice’) and in a comparison of Bath with Southampton (‘Love and Friendship’):
Tho’ Benevolent & Candid, she was Generous & sincere; Tho’ Pious & Good, she was Religious & amiable, & Tho, Elegant & Agreable, she was Polished & Entertaining. (pp. 10–11)
Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath & of the Stinking fish of Southampton. (p. 71)
In the first example, the balanced pairs of adjectives lead us to expect that a series of antitheses is about to be presented—although Lady Williams was this, she was (contrastingly) that. But the syntactic structures that promise contradiction and opposition turn out to yield nothing but sameness. In the second example, the conventional (and morally disapproving) abstraction of ‘unmeaning Luxuries’ collides, startlingly, with the low reality of ‘Stinking fish’, to which it is yoked by an ‘&’ that makes us expect a comparable level of abstraction in the second half of the sentence. The joke is brought home by the Johnsonian parallelism. In the first example, we expect difference, and meet with sameness; in the second instance, we expect sameness, and meet with difference. Once again, Austen shows that what cuts one way cuts the other. As in ‘Edgar & Emma’ and ‘The Visit’—in which apparently wealthy families live in needlessly harsh conditions or eat cheap, coarse food—high collides with low. Here Austen reverses the premiss of James Townley’s High Life Below Stairs (1759), a farce performed by her family in winter 1788, in which a group of servants impersonate aristocrats. In doing so, she enlists Johnson as an agent of bathos, a term given its comic sense of ‘Ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax’ by Pope in his prose treatise, Peri Bathos (1727).48
So Pope and Johnson both help the young Austen to engineer comic flops, to stage a series of triumphant verbal and syntactic let-downs. In addition to his stylistic donations, Johnson’s travels to the Highlands contribute to the Scottish flavour of Volume the Second. The passage in which Laura remembers how she and Sophia
sate down by the side of a clear limpid stream to refresh our exhausted limbs. The place was suited to meditation—. A Grove of full-grown Elms sheltered us from the East—. A Bed of full-grown Nettles from the West—. (p. 86)
comically recalls and accentuates the ‘rudeness’ of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, a work published in the year of Austen’s birth:
I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude.49
‘Lesley-Castle’ echoes various descriptions of isolated, rock-bound castles in Johnson’s Journey and in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides—a text published ten years after Johnson’s account of the same visit to Scotland and by way of a dress rehearsal for the full-length biography (in a letter of 1798, Austen mentions that her father has bought a copy of Boswell’s Journal, and that they ‘are to have’ his Life of Johnson).50 In chapter 14 of Northanger Abbey, Johnson is invoked on the basis of his overwhelming lexicographical authority— his Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755—while chapter 39 of Mansfield Park invokes his ‘celebrated judgment’ on matrimony and celibacy. Both ways of thinking about Johnson are entirely conventional in this period. He is quotable, and he is the definitive point of reference as far as linguistic correctness is concerned. Austen is neither cowed by nor resentful of such authority; rather, she feels licensed, even as a teenager, to play with it, to make it serve her own creative purposes.51
Pedagogical guides to language, such as John Trusler’s The Distinction Between Words Esteemed Synonymous (1776)—the first English thesaurus to be published—and Hester Lynch Piozzi’s British Synonymy (1794), suggest, as Austen’s writing does, the necessity of adjudicating between words that might appear to be exactly the same. Austen certainly knew Piozzi’s work well—she cites it in her Letters—because of Piozzi’s close friendship with Johnson, on whom she published a collection of biographical anecdotes in 1789.52 The ways in which Trusler and Piozzi, on their title pages, style the proper art of speaking as a form of learned discrimination, propriety, and regulation have obvious and immediate applicability to social and moral spheres, as they do in Austen. We might categorize her description of Lady Williams in ‘Jack & Alice’ as reversing the aims of Trusler’s thesaurus in eliciting the synonymity between words esteemed distinct. But Sense and Sensibility takes us back to Trusler again, dwelling on the need to distinguish between ‘like’, ‘esteem’, and ‘love’, terms that Mrs Dashwood prides herself on confounding:
‘It is enough,’ said she; ‘to say that he is unlike Fanny is enough. It implies everything amiable. I love him already.’
‘I think you will like him,’ said Elinor, ‘when you know more of him.’
‘Like him!’ replied her mother, with a smile. ‘I can feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.’
‘You may esteem him.’
‘I have never yet known what it was to separate esteem and love.’ (ch. 3)
Mrs Dashwood thinks it a positive virtue not to separate esteem and love. But her author implicitly regards this as evidence of linguistic, emotional, and moral confusion. Differences in vocabulary stand for differences of feeling and call for appropriate differences in conduct. In other words, Elinor’s mother should recognize and act on the distinction between ‘like’, ‘esteem’, and ‘love’. The early works show us how Jane Austen schooled herself in such niceties of verbal and stylistic discrimination, and in the forms of behaviour they license and curb. She tests the boundaries between words, sometimes by playfully exaggerating them, sometimes by refusing to acknowledge that any boundaries exist at all.
The teenage writings face in two directions, poised as they are between childhood and adulthood, between the fiction of sensibility and the realistic novel, and between suspicion and celebration of imaginative freedom. Sometimes a single word, such as ‘enthousiastic’ (in ‘Kitty, or the Bower’), can bring such mixed feelings into very clear view. Enthusiasm was a positive and negative attribute in Austen’s lifetime. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines the word (negatively) as ‘A vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication’ and ‘Heat of imagination; violence of passion; confidence of opinion’, but also (more positively) as ‘Elevation of Fancy; exaltation of ideas’. In her ‘warm’ rather than heated imagination, and in her cultivation of ‘Fancy’ (p. 170), Kitty seems to hover between the second and third senses of the word and therefore to anticipate both the outdoor ‘rambling fancy’ of Fanny Price (Mansfield Park, ch. 22) and the more culpable activities of Emma Woodhouse, an ‘imaginist … on fire with speculation and foresight’ (Emma, ch. 39).
Austen’s early works stand on the edge of imaginativ
e flight from a domestic schoolroom environment into the wider vistas of fiction, with their different but related forms of adjudication. For now, she was reckoning with the judgement of a highly literate family audience. Mary Stanhope, in ‘The three Sisters’, mirrors Laura, anti-heroine of ‘Love and Friendship’, in soliciting the eyes of the world and basking in performance—even when it reflects very badly on her. This aspect of her character, like that of Lydia Bennet, seems to reflect the collaborative origins of Austen’s early works and their reception at home:
The subject being now fairly introduced and she found herself the object of every one’s attention in company, she lost all her confusion & became perfectly unreserved & communicative.
‘I wonder you should never have heard of it before for in general things of this Nature are very well known in the Neighbourhood.’
‘I assure you said Jemima I never had the least suspicion of such an affair. Has it been in agitation long?’
‘Oh! yes, ever since Wednesday.’
They all smiled particularly Mr Brudenell.
‘You must know Mr Watts is very much in love with me, so that it is quite a match of Affection on his side.’
‘Not on his only, I suppose’ said Kitty.
‘Oh! when there is so much Love on one side there is no occasion for it on the other. However I do not much dislike him tho’ he is very plain to be sure.’
Mr Brudenell stared, the Miss Duttons laughed & Sophy & I were heartily ashamed of our Sister. (pp. 60–1)
That moment, in its light and excruciating hilarity, might sum up Austen’s teenage writings, concerned as they are with proper introductions, attention seeking, and company. They revel in the sort of unreserved communication that makes people stare, and then laugh.
1 Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) (hereafter Letters), 5.
2 Here and throughout, the titles of the individual teenage writings are standardized to the forms in which they appear on the Contents pages of the notebooks; the titles at the head of the stories sometimes differ.
3 See Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 70; and Jon Spence, Becoming Jane Austen: A Life (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), 62.
4 We know this from the list Cassandra Austen made of the dates of composition of the six published novels. ‘First Impressions’, the original draft of Pride and Prejudice, was written between October 1796 and August 1797; see Jane Austen, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (1954), rev. B. C. Southam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), facing 242.
5 Mock book formatting is a particular feature of Volume the First. The present edition offers modern print equivalents by representing as closely as possible the formal layout of dedications, titles, and letter salutations. For detailed physical descriptions of the notebooks and other visual features, see the headnote to each manuscript in Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (2010),
6 See Donald Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential, and Private (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 39, where he describes such manuscripts as ‘confidential’ publications, ‘addressed to a specific group of individuals all of whom either are personally known to the writer or belong to some predefined group that the writer has reason to believe share communal values with him or her’.
7 Christine Alexander notes how ‘[i]n children’s writing there is no contradiction between the literal and the fantastic’, in Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18.
8 Dedications to ‘Jack & Alice’ and ‘Mr Harley’ in Volume the First were evidently added later. See the original notebook (pp. 22, 104) in JA’s Fiction Manuscripts,
9 Cassandra is the dedicatee of ‘The beautifull Cassandra’ and ‘Ode to Pity’ in Volume the First, of ‘The History of England’ in Volume the Second, and of ‘Kitty, or the Bower’ in Volume the Third.
10 For the recent identification of the likenesses, see Annette Upfal, introduction to Jane Austen’s ‘The History of England’ & Cassandra’s Portraits, ed. Annette Upfal and Christine Alexander (Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2009).
11 The eldest of the eight Austen children, James (1765–1819) was actor–manager for family theatricals at Steventon parsonage. Between 1782 and 1790, he adapted contemporary plays, adding his own prologues and epilogues, for amateur performance. Some of these survive, along with notes of the roles taken by family members and friends. Jane dedicated her own play ‘The Visit’ in Volume the First to James. See Paula Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002), 6–24.
12 For more information on their provenance, see the headnotes to each notebook in JA’s Fiction Manuscripts,
13 See Thomas Keymer, ‘Rank’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 387–96.
14 The Watsons in JA’s Fiction Manuscripts,
15 Letters, 289 (to Anna Austen, 28 Sept. 1814).
16 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen Practising’, New Statesman, 19 (15 July 1922), 419–20; reprinted in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iii (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 331–5 (a review of Volume the Second, published as ‘Love and Freindship’ and Other Early Works (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Fredrick A. Stokes, 1922), with a preface by G. K. Chesterton).
17 Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1773), i, 3.
18 Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, i, 1–2.
19 Woolf, ‘Jane Austen Practising’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iii, 334. Austen was 17 years old when she wrote the final items in Volume the Second.
20 See ‘Chronology of the Teenage Writings’, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii.
21 It has been suggested that the hand is that of Jane Austen’s father, the Revd George Austen (Family Record, 78). But the letter shapes are also consistent with the hands of both Jane and Cassandra Austen.
22 Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Robert Bage, and William Godwin were all writing political novels of this kind through the 1790s, making Austen’s ‘Kitty’ in 1792 an early contribution to the form.
23 Austen referred to the family ‘improvement’ of her occasional poetry in a letter of 29 Nov. 1812 to Martha Lloyd (Letters, 205). She openly acknowledges family advice in the marginal display of sources on the manuscript pages of the ‘Plan of a Novel’, available to view in JA’s Fiction Manuscripts,
24 Anna Lefroy’s four leaves are digitized and transcribed in JA’s Fiction Manuscripts,
25 For Anna Austen’s collaborations with her aunt, see Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 224–5, 246–8.
26 Letters, 337 (to James Edward, 16 Dec. 1816), 339–40 (to Caroline Austen, 23 Jan. 1817). Portions survive from several of James Edward Austen’s teenage manuscript fictions in Winchester, Hampshire Record Office, MS 23M93/86/6/1–5. Some are datable by hand and by paper to 1812–17, when he was aged 13 to 18.
27 Kathryn Sutherland, ‘From Kitty to Catharine: James Edward Austen’s Hand in Volume the Third’, Review of English Studies, new series, 66 (2014), 124–43; and Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
28 Anna Lefroy’s and James Edward Austen’s continuations appear separately at the end of the text of Volume the Third in this edition. James Edward’s revisions are stripped out of Jane Austen’s texts
and are all noted within the Textual Notes as they occur, allowing readers to make comparison between original and revision.
29 Jenny McAuley, ‘ “A Long Letter Upon a Jacket and a Petticoat”: Reading Beneath some Deletions in the Manuscript of “Catharine, or The Bower” ’, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, 31 (2009), 191–8.
30 Letters, 27 (to Cassandra Austen, 18–19 Dec. 1798).
31 Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, 59 (1785), 476.
32 Miss Palmer, Female Stability: or, The History of Miss Belville, 5 vols. (London, 1780), iii, 158.
33 See J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 160.
34 Edward and Harriet, or The Happy Recovery; A Sentimental Novel, 2 vols. (London, 1788); Charles Dibdin, The Younger Brother: A Novel, 3 vols. (London, 1793), iii, 138.
35 See Pat Rogers, ‘Burney, Frances (1752–1840)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2015,
36 The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, i: 1768–1773, ed. Lars E. Troide (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 1–2.
37 See Family Record, 26, 41–2. By 1779, Thomas Fowle’s elder brother Fulwar Craven Fowle was a boarding pupil of the Revd George Austen; he was one of four boys (not including Jane Austen’s brothers) living at the rectory at that time.
38 Edward. A Novel, 2 vols. (London, 1774), ii, 82.
39 Letters, 280 (to Anna Austen, 18 Aug. 1814).
40 For a full list, see the map of London on p. lviii.