Steventon Rectory, much improved by George Austen, has long since been pulled down, but has been lovingly described for us by a younger generation of Austens. It must have been a pleasant, rambling house, with its seven bedrooms, its garden and elm walk, and the barn where, more economical than the Bertram family, the Austens put on their plays. There were servants, of course, and a carriage, though, like Mr. Bennet, Mr. Austen probably used his horses as much for farming the glebe as for drawing the carriage. There was probably not a great deal of time for social life with a family increasing so fast.
Mrs. Austen writes of Cassandra that she suckled her for the first quarter before weaning her and handing her over to a good woman in the village. This was probably the form with all the children. The phrase “put out to nurse” used in the Memoir does not, in fact, mean, as it might seem to, that the children had a wet nurse like little aristocrats. They were just weaned rather early, cared for in the village, visited daily by their parents, and brought home when they were about one, and, presumably, their busy mother had had her next child, or, at least, felt ready to cope with them. As a system, it seems to have worked admirably. With one exception, the young Austens were a quite strikingly bright and successful family. The exception was George, the second son, who was subject to fits. Mrs. Austen wrote hopefully about him for a while. Mr. Austen was more realistic, writing in 1770, “We must not be too sanguine ... we have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or a wicked child.” Two years later, Tysoe Saul Hancock wrote another of his gloomy letters home from India. George, his godson, must, he said, “be provided for without the least hopes of his being able to assist himself”.
The Austens managed. All we know is that George lived on until 1838, so he must have been well cared for somewhere. A backward brother of Mrs. Austen’s, Thomas Leigh, was being quietly looked after in rural seclusion, supported by a small income. In those days of annual childbearing such cases were almost inevitable. Perhaps George went to live with him, or, perhaps more likely, he may simply have been returned to the “good woman” who had nursed him at Deane. Jane Austen refers in her letters to “talking on her fingers” to a very deaf man, and this may have been the way she communicated with her brother George. Communicate with him, in so far as it was possible, I am sure she did. Miss Brigid Brophy has produced a fascinatingly far-fetched theory by which the Austens suffered from a kind of family guilt complex about their treatment of George, with the most disastrous effects, among other things, on Jane Austen’s attitude to sex. But the Austens simply were not that kind of family. We hear no more about George because he was undoubtably one of the subjects Cassandra deleted from her sister’s letters, and one the family very likely preferred not to discuss.
The rest of the Austen children grew up gaily enough. At seven, Frank bought a pony called Squirrel with £1 12s. of his own money, hunted it for a couple of years (in his mother’s hunting pink), and sold it at a profit. They were a competent family. Mrs. Austen was not quite so capable as usual over the birth of her daughter Jane. She expected her in November, but her husband wrote on December 17th, 1775, to apologise to his half-brother’s wife, Mrs. Walter, who must have “wondered a little we were in our old age grown such bad reckoners ... however last night the time came ... We have now another girl, a present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion. She is to be Jenny, and seems to me as if she would be as like Henry, as Cassy is to Neddy.” He was to prove a true prophet on every count.
Jane Austen’s godparents were Jane, wife of her father’s benefactor, Francis Austen, and the Reverend Samuel Cooke, of Great Bookham, who had married her mother’s cousin, another Cassandra, daughter of Theophilus Leigh. No doubt Jane, like her sister, was “suckled ... through the first quarter”, and then “weaned and settled at a good woman’s at Deane”. And no doubt she, too, was “very healthy and lively”, and soon into short petticoats.
But their mother was a busy woman, and, possibly, like other mothers, rather more interested in her boys than her girls. And with seven children, and the pupils, the seven-bedroomed house must have been stretched to bursting. At all events, while the boys stayed at home, to be tutored, along with the paying pupils, by their father, Cassandra and Jane were sent off, at a remarkably early age, to boarding school. Jane was only six, but as Mrs. Austen explained, where Cassandra went, Jane must go too. “If Cassandra was going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.” Even together, it must have been a sufficiently drastic experience. They went, first, to Oxford, to a school run by a Mrs. Cawley, widow of the Principal of Brasenose. It was a family connection, and not, as it proved, a lucky one. Mrs. Cawley was “a stiff-mannered person”, the sister of the Reverend Edward Cooper, who had married Mrs. Austen’s own sister, Jane. One of the comforts of the Austen girls must have been that their slightly older cousin, Jane Cooper, went too. It was lucky for them that she did. Mrs. Cawley presently moved her school to Southampton and there the two Austen girls caught putrid fever (no doubt diphtheria again, as in the case of poor little George Hastings). Mrs. Cawley seems to have shrugged her shoulders over the business. What, after all, were a couple of girls? But Jane Cooper was worried about her cousins and wrote to her mother. Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Austen descended on the school and removed their daughters just in time. Jane Austen nearly died. Tragically, Mrs. Cooper caught the infection, and did die. It was 1783, and Jane was seven.
The three girls then had another, and apparently happier experience of boarding school at the Abbey School, Reading, run by a Mrs. Latournelle, an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman. The place was pleasant, and the discipline light. The three girls could go out and dine at an inn with their respective brothers, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper, and some of their friends, when they happened to be passing through Reading. Family tradition dates their leaving school as 1784 or 1785, when Jane Austen would have been eight or nine — one has, constantly, to remember that her birthday was in December. But Mr. Austen was still making payments to Mrs. Latournelle in 1785, ‘86 and ‘87. It seems more likely that the girls were still there than that their father was behind with his payments.
The date of 1787 for the final return home would make sense in other ways. The house would have been much emptier. James had left home long before, having gone up to St. John’s as Founder’s Kin in 1779 at the early age of fourteen. Henry followed him there, not quite so brilliantly, at seventeen, in the summer of 1788. Meanwhile Edward, the lucky one, had been adopted by those rich cousins, the Knights, who had given Mr. Austen his living of Steventon. Edward had visited them a good deal as a boy, and his father had finally protested that it was interfering too much with his education. But Mrs. Austen had seen things differently. “I think, my dear,” she is reported to have said, “you had better oblige your cousins and let the child go.” She won the day. Edward kept up his visits to Kent, was formally adopted at last and sent on the Grand Tour, that essential training for a young gentleman of fashion, in 1786-8. He was a sensible choice on the part of the childless Knights. James, the eldest Austen, had expectations of his own on the maternal side. His mother’s brother, for whom he was named, had become James Leigh Perrot on inheriting money from a maternal great-uncle. He and his wife, another Jane, had been married since 1764 and were still childless. James seemed their logical heir. Poor George had already disappeared from the scene, and there was Edward, competent and good-looking like all the Austens, but quite evidently not a scholar like his brothers James and Henry. Money and the Grand Tour were just right for him. As for Francis, of the pink coat and the hunting exploits, he was already well-launched on a naval career. He joined the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth in 1786 and did so well that he got a chance to go as a volunteer to the East Indies in 1788. Charles followed him to the Naval Academy in 1791, but already there must have begun to be room for the girls.
Aside from the scanty framework of dates, we know nothing about Cassandra’s and Jane’s education, except its results. The aut
hor of the Memoir suggests that his own father, their elder brother James, who “was well read in English literature ... and wrote readily and happily, both in prose and verse ... had ... a large share in directing Jane’s reading and forming her taste”. Very likely he did. Henry, too, probably had his influence on his sisters’ education, along with their father and the pupils and family visitors who continued to play a part in the lively and changing family scene. Even their mother may have contributed more to their education than housewifery. And, no doubt, like the Bennet girls, they had visiting masters to teach the really essential female accomplishments. Jane could play the piano; Cassandra could draw; and they both sewed and embroidered beautifully, Jane being particularly good at satin stitch.
A good deal of biographical dust has been stirred up over the question of Jane Austen’s education in general, and her knowledge of languages in particular. As so often, it is her own fault. It is so extraordinarily difficult to know when to take her seriously. When she wrote the Prince Regent’s librarian that she could “boast herself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress”, she was probably about as serious as when she described her History of England as “by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian”. I imagine that she had small Latin and less Greek, but her knowledge of French is established, for me at least, by a casual little phrase in one of her letters about “the feu of bru the Bishop”.
In fact, she and Cassandra had the kind of education she preferred for her own heroines: plenty of books, plenty of time, and plenty of good talk. Those were happy years. The Austens were great ones for charades, and riddles, and impromptu verses of all kinds. At Christmas and midsummer, when the pupils went home and the family came back there, they entertained their friends and relations by putting on their own plays. They did The Rivals in 1784, Which is the Man and Bon Ton in 1787, and The Sultan and High Life Below Stairs in 1788. Mr. Austen may have been a clergyman, but he was no Edmund Bertram, and Mrs. Austen joined in the fun with a will.
“I like first cousins to be first cousins, and interested in one another,” Jane Austen wrote to a niece later in life, and one cousin in particular must have stood out at this time. George Austen’s sister, Philadelphia Hancock, had come home from India about 1765 with her daughter Eliza, then four years old. Her husband had come too, but had soon found the cost of living too much for him and had gone sadly back to India in 1769, chasing the forlorn hope of a fortune, and writing regularly to his wife about his beloved daughter’s education. He never saw either of them again, but died, still impecunious, in 1775. Fortunately Warren Hastings, who was Eliza’s godfather, had come to the rescue in the meanwhile by settling ten thousand pounds on mother and daughter. It makes one wonder, just a little, about the relationship between them, but Hastings was known for his generosity.
Anyway, Eliza was able to grow up as a young lady, with the accomplishments Tysoe Saul Hancock had wanted for her. In 1777, her mother took her to Europe, very likely for reasons of economy as well as of education. By 1870 they were in Paris and moving apparently in the best society. The Austen Papers contains letters written by Eliza to her cousin, and Jane Austen’s, Philadelphia Walter, daughter of George Austen’s half-brother. Eliza went to Versailles and described Marie Antoinette as “a very fine woman ... most elegantly dressed”. And, soon, she married a Frenchman, and a count at that, becoming Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide. Her husband, she told her cousin, adored her, though she was not particularly in love with him. He must at least have been a man of some political acumen. When Eliza became pregnant at the end of 1785, he insisted that she go to England to bear the child. She did so, grumbling a little about the inconvenience of it all (her husband could not accompany her), and the inelegant state in which she must be reunited with her family. Her son Hastings was born in the summer of 1786 and, owing to his father’s forethought, would not be liable for military service in France. But poor little Hastings, like his cousin George, was subject to fits. Unlike George, he died young, in 1801.
Eliza’s mother, Mrs. Hancock, had always kept in close touch with her brother’s family, and, when possible, had seen Mrs. Austen through her many child-bearings. The bond must have been a close one, and Eliza certainly looked on Steventon as a second home when she was in England. James visited her in France in the spring of 1786, and Henry stayed with her in London both in 1787 and 1788, and rather hoped to return to France with her that year, but unfortunately a Fellow of St. John’s was so inconsiderate as to die, leaving a place vacant, of which he had to take advantage. The visit to her in London must have been interesting enough. She was on intimate terms with Warren Hastings and his second wife, and probably took Henry, as well as her Cousin Philadelphia, to a session of Hastings’ famous trial for “high crimes and misdemeanours” supposedly committed during his term of office as Governor-General in India. This politically-motivated trial loomed large in the public eye between 1788 and 1795 and must have been followed with close attention by the Austens. When Warren Hastings was finally found not guilty, he received, among other congratulations, a rather sycophantic letter from Henry Austen. It must have been small comfort considering the financial straits to which the long trial had reduced him. There would be no more help for Eliza from this quarter.
Eliza, meanwhile, continued “the greatest rake imaginable”, as she wrote to her Cousin Philadelphia, but went happily from drawing-rooms and Almack’s to join in the Austen family theatricals at Steventon. In November 1787 she wrote on her Aunt Austen’s behalf to invite Philadelphia to join them in their Christmas production of Which is the Man and Bon Ton. “I assure you we shall have a most brilliant party and a great deal of amusement, the house full of company and frequent balls. You cannot possibly resist so many temptations, especially when I tell you your old friend James is returned from France and is to be of the acting party.” But Philadelphia must have returned an answer like Fanny Price’s. On November 23rd Eliza wrote again about “the strong reluctance you express to what you call appearing in public”. And then, on a firmer note, she repeated her invitation: “Provided however you could bring yourself to act, for my Aunt Austen declares ‘She has not room for any idle young people’.”
Philadelphia did not go, so we are deprived of one of the faintly disapproving letters she used to write to her own brother James about their cousin and “her dissipated life”. We have to imagine the brilliant party and the frequent balls, the crowded, cheerful rectory, and twelve-year-old Jane watching it all, and doubtless drawing her own conclusions as her brilliant cousin the Countess flirted impartially with James and Henry Austen at once. It is interesting in the light of the galaxy of male ones she was to create, that the first flirt Jane Austen is on record as encountering was female.
Did Mrs. Austen breathe a quiet, maternal sigh of relief when Eliza went back to France in 1788? If she did, it was premature. The connection was very far from being ended. About this time we get some rare glimpses of the Austen girls in their youth. Mr. and Mrs. Austen, Cassandra and Jane visited their benefactor, Francis Austen the attorney in Kent that summer, and while there they met their cousin Philadelphia Walter for the first time. Philadelphia wrote to her brother that Cassandra was supposed to be very like herself, and, “I can’t help thinking her very pretty ... The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve.” And then, on a warmer note, she went on to describe parents and daughters as all “in high spirits and disposed to be pleased with each other”. But, “Jane is whimsical and affected.” Those observant eyes may have looked through the new-met cousin a little too obviously. Jane would learn to be more guarded as she grew up.
By 1791, the outbreak of the French Revolution had brought Eliza back to England with her little boy. The fact that her husband soon returned to France does not seem to have dampened her lively spirits, and she was soon writing Philadelphia that Cassandra and Jane “are perfect bea
uties and of course gain ‘hearts by dozens’.” Next year, a real disaster struck her in the death of her mother, to whom she was devoted. She went to Steventon to be comforted, and wrote Philadelphia that Cassandra and Jane “are both very much grown ... and greatly improved as well in manners as in person, both of which are now much more formed than when you saw them. They are I think equally sensible, and both so to a degree seldom met with, but still my heart gives the preference to Jane, whose kind partiality to me indeed requires a return of the same nature.” And then, with a logical connection that might have alarmed Mrs. Austen, “Henry is now rather more than six foot high ... As to the coolness which you knew had taken place between H and myself, it has now ceased, in consequence of due acknowledgements on his part.”
James had proved fickle. He married Anne Mathew, a general’s daughter, in the spring of 1792, and the young couple set up housekeeping on an income of three hundred pounds a year. Edward, in Kent, had made the more prosperous match suitable to the adoptive heir of a fortune. He had married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Brook Bridges in December, 1791, and by the autumn of 1792 Eliza could report to Philadelphia that, “Both Mrs. James and Mrs. Edward Austen are in the increasing way.” That winter, the Austen girls’ cousin and schoolmate, Jane Cooper, lost her father suddenly just before her intended marriage. She went straight to Steventon and was married from there, in December, to Captain Thomas Williams, R.N., who was to play a grateful part in the naval advancement of his young cousins-in-law, Charles and Francis. It is significant of the atmosphere at Steventon that bereavement and disaster always brought the cousins there. Altogether, what with deaths and births, courtings and marriages, balls and theatricals, there must have been plenty of material at hand for a girl who was beginning to discover the pleasures of writing.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 2