We do not know when she attended her first public ball (they happened once a month all winter at Basingstoke), any more than we know when she wrote her first story, but, for both events, an early date is more probable than a late one. The Austens were a family who enjoyed playing with words. They wrote riddles in the elaborate style of the period, and celebrated family occasions in comic verse. When Jane was growing up, her eldest brother, James, was a Fellow at Oxford, and running his own periodical, The Loiterer, (no connection, of course, with The Rambler or The Spectator), and Henry, also at Oxford, was contributing to it. It has, in fact, been suggested that the thirteen-year-old Jane may have contributed a letter signed “Sophia Sentiment” to the March, 1789, number of The Loiterer. At all events, there was writing in the air, and a sympathetic audience ready. So when exactly did young Jane start writing? Long afterwards, when she lay dying at Winchester, she sent a message to her twelve-year-old niece Caroline, who had already started to write. “If I would take her advice,” Caroline reported her aunt as saying, “I should cease writing till I was sixteen ... she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less, in the corresponding years of her own life.”
If we accept the year 1787 for the date of the Austen girls’ return home from Mrs. Latournelle’s school, it seems reasonable to take this, when Jane was nearly twelve, as the date of the earliest of the minor works that survive in three closely-written notebooks. Jane Austen may have regretted, as she told Caroline, that she had not read more and written less, but she still felt kindly enough towards what she had written to copy and save it, and we must be grateful to her.
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Experts agree in assigning the miscellaneous pieces that Jane Austen copied into her three notebooks to the years 1787 to 1793, when she was twelve to eighteen. The juvenile hand-writing of the earliest pieces in Volume the First is probably almost contemporary with their composition, but Jane Austen continued the painstaking copying of these early works for many years. It is another reminder of how much time she had. The originals are lost, and the three volumes are not necessarily copied in chronological order of composition, but B. C. Southam has worked out a convincing arrangement for them, and argues that at least all the earliest pieces are, quite evidently, in Volume the First.
The varied and often delightful contents of these three volumes were written for Jane Austen’s whole family. They were a public, not a private joke. And the dedications with which she furnished them, in parody of the fashion of the time, showed that the varying family group, diminished by the absence of some members, was also enlarged from time to time during this period by visits from friends, relations, and married brothers. There are dedications to all the immediate members of the family (except, of course, the unfortunate George), and to the two first nieces, James’s daughter Anna and Edward’s daughter Fanny. The family circle was growing. Fanny and Anna were both born in 1793, so that the solemn dedications to them must have been by way of christening presents from their “affectionate aunt”.
Two pieces are dedicated to the Austens’ cousin, Jane Cooper, and the best known of all the Juvenilia, Love and Freindship [sic] to their cousin Eliza, Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide, no doubt on the occasion of one of her Christmas visits to Steventon. Frederic and Elfrida, the first piece in Volume the First, is dedicated to Martha Lloyd, “As a small testimony of the gratitude I feel for your late generosity to me in finishing my muslin cloak ...” while Evelyn, in Volume the Third, which is dated May 6th, 1792, is dedicated to Martha’s sister Mary.
The Lloyd girls were probably Cassandra and Jane’s closest friends. Their widowed mother had lived for a few years as tenant of Deane Rectory, moving to a house called Ibthorp, eighteen miles away, in 1792, no doubt because James Austen was marrying and taking over at Deane. The connection between Lloyds and Austens, reinforced in various ways, was to continue through all their lives. Mrs. Lloyd had been one of three Miss Cravens, daughters of a notorious Lady Craven, whose brutal neglect of her children had been an eighteenth-century scandal and whose story probably lies behind both Lesley Castle and Lady Susan. Mrs. Lloyd’s other daughter, Eliza, had already married her cousin Fulwar Craven Fowle, whose brother Thomas had been a pupil at Steventon Rectory and was to be still more closely linked with the Austens.
There were other close friends in those lively, sociable growing years. When the Austen girls went to the monthly Assembly Balls at Basingstoke, they often stayed with their friends the Misses Bigg, daughters of Mr. Bigg Wither of Manydown, and no doubt treated their younger brother Harris, six years younger than Jane, very much as they did their “own particular brother”, Charles. Nearer home, there were the Digweed boys, sons of Mr. Digweed who rented Steventon Manor from Mr. Knight, and, most important to Jane, Mrs. Lefroy, wife of the neighbouring Rector of Ashe, a cultivated woman who seems to have acted, to some extent, as mother-substitute for Mrs. Austen, who, though only fifty-three in 1793 seems already to have acquired some of the habits and privileges of old age. She had worked hard, and borne and reared eight children in fourteen years. Now, when Jane and Cassandra went out dancing, chaperoned by friends, she stayed at home with her sixty-two-year-old husband.
Since we have none of Jane Austen’s own letters written before 1796, the Juvenilia themselves give us our best picture of her teenage years. First and foremost, they show her as an omnivorous reader, despite that caution of hers to her niece Caroline. When she said that she wished she had read more and written less, she very probably meant that she wished she had read more selectively. According to her brother Henry, “Her reading was very extensive in history and belles lettres; and her memory extremely tenacious. Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose and Cowper in verse.” She preferred Richardson to Fielding, was “enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque”, and, later in life, was teased a good deal about her passion for Crabbe’s poetry, and recognised Scott at once as the author of Waverley.
She and her family were happy addicts of the novel: “great novel-readers and not ashamed of being so,” she said herself in a letter of 1798. The greater part of her Juvenilia are skits on one kind of contemporary fictional excess or another, and our enjoyment of them is partly, though only partly, dependent on our knowledge of the butt.
Here is Richardson, and the novel in letters:
DEAR SALLY,
I have found a very convenient old hollow oak to put our letters in; for you know we have long maintained a private correspondence. It is about a mile from my house and seven from yours. You may perhaps imagine that I might have made choice of a tree which would have divided the distance more equally — I was sensible of this at the time, but as I considered that the walk would be of benefit to you in your weak and uncertain state of health, I preferred it to one nearer your house, and am your faithful
BENJAMIN BARR.
The contemporary novel of extreme sensibility is another favourite target, but one that seems to have irritated the young author almost beyond humour. Evelyn, where everyone acts from motives of the most ludicrous sensibility, is one of the least entertaining of these very miscellaneous pieces. The same is true of Jane Austen’s attempts to parody contemporary drama. It is odd that someone who was to write such admirable dialogue should have had so little gift for the theatre, but the dramatic fragments are as disappointing as the occasional attempts at verse:
When Corydon went to the fair
He bought a red ribbon for Bess,
With which she encircled her hair
And made herself look very fess.
Whose daughter has not produced something like this? It is, of course, one of the very earliest of the Juvenilia, dated by Chapman as written between 1787 and 1790, that is between Jane Austen’s twelfth and fifteenth years.
The other pieces belonging to this period are particularly interesting for the light they cast on the family circle in and for which they were written. Jane Austen’s brother Henry claimed, rather primly, that she liked Fielding less th
an Richardson because “she recoiled from everything gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals.” Following his line, Jane Austen’s modern detractors like to write of her as a born old maid, who peered myopically at a limited world through blinkers. They must have forgotten about the Johnsons (in Jack and Alice) who “were a family of love, and though a little addicted to the bottle and the dice, had many good qualities”, and who ended a lively evening at the gaming table by being carried home “dead drunk”. And there is Lucy, in the same piece, who began by being caught in a man-trap on her beloved’s estate and ended the victim of a rival, “who jealous of her superior charms took her by poison from an admiring world at the age of seventeen”.
In her early teens, Jane Austen struck a curiously modern note in her mockery of the kind of contemporary hero and heroine who thought nothing of robbing their benefactors, and believed it their duty to disobey their parents. It seems that the angry young man is not an entirely twentieth-century invention after all. “My father,” says a baronet’s son in Love and Freindship, “is a mean and mercenary wretch!” “Seduced by the false glare of fortune and the deluding pomp of title,” this deplorable parent has urged his son to marry the Lady Dorothea, with whom, in fact, he is in love. His answer is inevitable. “Lady Dorothea is lovely and engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but know, Sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your wishes. No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my father.” Jane Austen goes on, incorrigibly, to have it both ways in the father’s answer. “Where Edward in the name of wonder (said he) did you pick up this unmeaning gibberish? You have been studying novels I suspect.” Naturally, the hero refuses to reply to this unfair insinuation, mounts his horse and sets out on a succession of mock-picaresque adventures.
Already, from time to time, in these early works, one hears, clear as a bell, the delicious, unmistakable note of Jane Austen’s laughter. “Preserve yourself from a first love,” says Lady Williams in Jack and Alice, “and you need not fear a second.” The heroines of Love and Freindship faint “alternately on a sofa”, and one of them, dying of a chill, apostrophises the other as follows: “Beware of swoons, dear Laura ... A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to health in its consequences — Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint.”
Love and Freindship is perhaps the most entertaining of the early works, but Lesley Castle and Catherine are the more significant for Jane Austen’s development. They show the young author moving gradually away from her basis in parody towards the novel itself. Northanger Abbey is simply a further stage in the same development. Its heroine, incidentally, was originally called Susan, not Catherine.
Throughout the Juvenilia, young Jane Austen was quite evidently enjoying herself in her new element, experimenting with sentence structure, with Johnsonian antithesis, and with alliteration, and entertaining her family with topical jokes. “Beware of the unmeaning luxuries of Bath and the stinking fish of Southampton,” says Isabel in Love and Freindship, and the author, reading aloud, could no doubt depend on her family’s sympathetic laughter. There must have been a visit to that stiff Aunt and Uncle Leigh Perrot who divided their time between their house, Scarlets, in Berkshire, and Bath. Jane Austen was later to write: “‘Tis really very kind of my aunt to ask us to Bath again; a kindness that deserves a better return than to profit by it.” The Southampton reference may hark further back to that unlucky school episode, but it is more likely to celebrate a happier occasion described in a characteristically arch letter of Eliza de Feuillide’s in 1791. “As to Cassandra it is very possible as you observe that some son of Neptune may have obtained her approbation as she probably experienced much homage from these very gallant gentlemen during her aquatic excursions. I hear her sister and herself are two of the prettiest girls in England.” Perhaps Cassandra and her parents had accompanied Charles to the Portsmouth Naval Academy, where he was enrolled that year, and where Francis had already distinguished himself. No doubt it was with Francis’ older friends that Cassandra made her “aquatic excursions”. It is sad to think that Bath and Southampton, so light-heartedly mentioned here, were later to be the setting for the unhappiest and least productive years of Jane Austen’s life.
But, for the moment, all was matter for her mirth. An unusual departure was her comic History of England, based on Goldsmith’s History with a few light-hearted side-glances to Shakespeare, and foreshadowing, to a quite surprising extent, Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That. The History runs from the reign of Henry IV, who “ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399”, to that of Charles I, where the young author leaves off, admitting that, “The recital of any events (except what I make myself) is uninteresting to me.” As so often with Jane Austen, it is hard, in this extravaganza, to tell just where the laughter stops. Was she entirely serious, as her family thought, in her defence of Mary Stuart? She certainly anticipated a modern shift of historical opinion by coming out strongly in defence of the House of York, and even of Richard III. After all, as she sagely observes, “If Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York, why might not Lambert Simnel be the widow of Richard.” She also quotes a surprisingly realistic charade on James I’s favourite, Carr. Speech and thought must have been remarkably free at Steventon Rectory.
But the Juvenilia also reflect other, sharper experiences of adolescence. Where should we look for the original of Catherine’s jealous aunt who so misconstrued the girl’s lively friendliness with young men? And who was the source for the great lady in the Collection of Letters, who anticipates Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s discourteous treatment of Charlotte Collins? We shall never know, but what does become obvious through the ebullience, the exaggeration and the sheer nonsense of the Juvenilia is that their young author was very far from being an inexperienced country mouse. Those observant eyes had seen a great deal, that happy spirit had found much to criticise as well as much to laugh at in the world by the time Jane Austen was eighteen.
Then, maddeningly, silence falls for three years. We know from the Life[3] that Jane Austen visited Southampton at about this time and apparently went to a ball there, and that she and Cassandra went to stay with Edward and his wife in Kent, and with friends (probably the Fowles) in Gloucestershire. But there are no letters for this period. Cassandra and Jane paid their visits together and undoubtedly wrote home to their parents, but Mrs. Austen was not the kind of mother who saved her children’s letters. With seven of them active in the world, it is hardly surprising.
It seems to have been at this time that Jane Austen took a vital step forward in her career as an author. She stopped writing for the whole family and started writing for herself. But what did she write first? Many years later, Cassandra wrote a brief note on the dating of her sister’s novels, which suggests that an early version of Sense and Sensibility called Elinor and Marianne was written about this time, and there is a family tradition that this was a novel in letters. This instantly suggests a connection with Jane Austen’s one surviving novel in letters, Lady Susan. Experts disagree about the date of Lady Susan, but I think it is safe to assume that these two books occupied Jane Austen between 1793 and 1796, when, according to Cassandra, she began work on First Impressions, which was to become our Pride and Prejudice.
Unfortunately, no copy of Elinor and Marianne survives. Jane Austen seems to have destroyed her original texts when she was satisfied with her revision. But even in its final form, as Sense and Sensibility, the book seems to me to share another significant characteristic with Lady Susan. These two are Jane Austen’s harshest books. Lady Susan would come as a surprise from her pen at whatever age she wrote it. This curiously cold-blooded study of a wicked woman is almost entirely without humour. Until the very end, the laughter is silent. Then, at last, having perhaps written herself into a better temper, Jane Austen allows herself a characteristic note. She abandons the l
etter form and writes a conclusion in her own unmistakable style. “This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office Revenue, be continued longer.” And she goes on to wind up the affairs of her characters with the kind of brisk, humorous affection that ends Northanger Abbey.
Many people find it impossible really to like Sense and Sensibility. Elinor is often too sensible to be borne, and Marianne too silly, while the minor characters tend dangerously towards caricature. Even in the final version, a kind of bad temper that we do not readily associate with Jane Austen will keep breaking through. Mr. Palmer’s habitual rudeness is not funny, though we try to think it so, and Lucy Steele goes in for a type of psychological cruelty that Lady Susan would have admired. The scenes where she insists on confiding in Elinor about her love for Elinor’s beloved Edward are curiously painful, and so is the way Elinor lays herself open to them and, inevitably, to a charge of hypocrisy: “I should be undeserving of the confidence you have honoured me with, if I felt no desire for its continuance, or no farther curiosity on its subject. I will not apologise therefore for bringing it forward again.” She may not need to apologise to Lucy, but she should, or her author should, to us. Of course, something stiff in Elinor’s tone, here and at other critical points of the book, may be the result of the translation from letter form. But I think there is more to it than this. I think these two books were written during a grave crisis of Jane Austen’s life, and very probably helped her through it.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 4