1795 was Jane Austen’s twentieth year. Catherine Morland or Marianne Dashwood would have thought her almost on the shelf. And indeed her life must have changed to a quite extraordinary extent since the carefree days of the Juvenilia, when there was almost always a brother at home to share the family jokes. By now, James and Edward were married men, James with one, Edward with two children. Charles and Francis were both at sea, and Henry, Jane’s favourite brother, must have been rather evidently at sea in another sense. At once the most brilliant and the least successful of the family, he had thought of taking orders, had changed his mind and become a lieutenant of the Oxford Militia in 1793.
It is tempting to connect this change of plan with the final return to England of that brilliant older cousin of his, Eliza de Feuillide. Revealed in her letters as a witty, frivolous, gossiping creature, Eliza thought nothing of the Church, and Henry, quite evidently, thought a good deal of her. Her husband the Count had sent her to England for her safety, while he returned to France, hoping to save at least something of the family estate from the rising tide of the French Revolution. Instead, he was caught trying to help a friend who was already engulfed by it, was convicted of suborning and seducing witnesses, and guillotined in February 1794. His mistress gave evidence at his trial, but then it was twelve eventful years since his wife had written that “he literally adores me.”
Jane Austen had encountered death before, when her aunt Jane Cooper caught diphtheria from them, but that had been when she was only a child. The death, under such horrible circumstances, of her cousin’s husband, though we do not know if she had ever met him, must have been a considerable shock to the eighteen-year-old girl, who would hate France all her life. It may, perhaps, have been a kind of double shock. None of Eliza de Feuillide’s letters to the Austen family survive, but she certainly wrote to them, probably to Jane, who was her favourite of the two sisters, and undoubtedly in the same frivolous tone she used to their cousin Philadelphia Walter. Did she take her husband’s death too lightly? After all, she had never pretended to love him, and very likely knew about the mistress he kept in France. Or, perhaps worse still, did she parade a grief everyone knew she did not feel? It must all have been hideously complicated, for the Austens, by the question of Henry. For Jane, it may have been a double disillusionment. Eliza had written Philadelphia about Jane’s “kind partiality to me”, and Henry was Jane’s favourite brother.
Another, closer family death followed in 1795. James Austen’s wife Anne had lived only a mile and a half away from the Austens at Deane and must have been, by then, very much a member of the family. Her death was equally sudden and unexpected, and her two-year-old daughter Anna was brought at once to Steventon to be cared for and consoled by her young aunts. That they did this successfully is clear from Anna’s long, intimate relationship with them both, but it must have made it a sad year for the Austens.
Something probably much more drastic even than these encounters with death and disillusionment happened to Jane Austen about this time. Cassandra fell in love. We do not know anything about the development of her relationship with Tom Fowle. He had been her father’s pupil long before, and must have kept in touch with the Austens through his brother’s marriage to Eliza Lloyd. Now he was a clergyman. Cassandra and Jane had visited his family, and by 1795 he and Cassandra were engaged and she was doubtless busy working on her trousseau. Next year, Mrs. Austen, writing to welcome a new daughter-in-law, mentioned Cassandra’s prospective departure for Shropshire. This must have been a reference to a living there promised to Tom Fowle by his relative, Lord Craven, but until it fell vacant, there was no money to marry on. Tom Fowle went to the West Indies in 1796 as regimental chaplain with Lord Craven, and Cassandra stayed at home at Steventon.
And what of Jane? So far, she and Cassandra had always shared everything, whether good or bad. “If Cassandra was going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.” And here was something Jane could not share. What did she feel? How did she bear it? We have no idea. But it seems to me that whatever precise and painful form it took, this experience must lie behind that curiously repeated situation in the novels where the heroine finds herself, against her will, the confidante in a love affair that concerns her all too closely. Sense and Sensibility provides the most obvious case, but there is poor Fanny Price, too, and Anne Elliot watching the Musgrove sisters compete for Captain Wentworth, and listening to his sister’s comments on the progress of the affair. Even Emma knows a near touch of tragedy when Harriet artlessly confides in her that she loves Mr. Knightley and imagines her love returned.
This is not, of course, to suggest that Jane Austen harped on this painful theme because she had suffered a similar experience. She need not have been in love with Tom Fowle, as her sister was, though it does seem a possibility not to be ignored. She may, quite simply, have been jealous of Cassandra’s love for him. It would have been a very human reaction. For the first time, she would have found herself taking second place in the beloved sister’s affections. It must have been very lonely, all of a sudden, in the shared bedroom at Steventon.
The first result of this, in my view, was Lady Susan, a kind of literary exercise, a study at once in evil and in the novel in letters. It was never to see the light of day in Jane Austen’s lifetime. Cassandra did not mention it in her chronology of her sister’s books, but left the untitled manuscript to her niece Fanny Knatchbull. James Edward Austen-Leigh published it, with his title and Lady Knatchbull’s permission, as an addition to the second edition of his Memoir of his aunt in 1871. That is almost all that we know about this undated fair copy, except that two of the sheets are watermarked 1805. But the Memoir refers to a family tradition that it was “an early production”, while the authors of the Life say it was written about the same time as Elinor and Marianne, which they attribute to 1795.
There were probably two good reasons for the use of the old-fashioned letter form in Lady Susan. The first was that by using letters for her study of a brilliant, unscrupulous woman, Jane Austen was putting her antiheroine at one remove from the reader. She was implying, as Richardson did in his books, that she was merely the “editor”, not the creator of her adventuress. Why did she do this? In my view, because Lady Susan is the only one of her characters who is quite evidently, and to a surprisingly large extent, drawn from life — or rather, from two lives.
Which brings us to the other, and probably less conscious reason for Jane Austen’s use of the letter form. If Eliza de Feuillide was half so faithful a correspondent with Steventon as she was with her Cousin Philadelphia, Jane Austen must have had a perfect goldmine of raw material ready to hand. One has only to compare a few of Lady Susan’s letters with Eliza’s (preserved in the Austen Papers) to be aware of the resemblance. And Eliza would certainly have written regularly to Steventon because she did not like to lose touch with her “beaux”. It is her word, and it gives an immediate clue to Jane Austen’s feelings about her. In the novels, it is the vulgar characters who talk about beaux, the Miss Steeles, and Emma Watson’s underbred sisters. Gay, worldly Eliza must have failed some half-conscious test of her Cousin Jane’s, and at this time of psychological low-water her letters may have provided the same kind of springboard into fantasy that contemporary novels had previously supplied.
But though the style of Lady Susan’s letters is like Eliza’s, her character is not. Eliza de Feuillide may have been a lightweight, but within her limits she seems to have been a good mother and a good wife. Lady Susan is nothing of the kind. For her character, Jane Austen had almost certainly gone back to the stories the Lloyd girls could tell about their mother and aunts’ sufferings at the hands of the unnatural Lady Craven. Lady Susan’s heartless treatment of her daughter Frederica is crucial to the plot of this hard, brilliant book. A widow with one daughter, Lady Susan has to leave her friends the Manwarings, with whom she has stayed since the death of her husband, because of the justified rage of Mrs. Manwaring. As if having an affair
with Mr. Manwaring was not enough, Lady Susan has also contrived to snatch Mrs. Manwaring’s sister’s young man, not for herself but for her daughter, who detests him. Penniless, Lady Susan then goes to stay with her brother-in-law, Mr. Vernon, and his wife, against whom she has plotted in the past. They are therefore armed against her wiles, but just the same she has soon charmed Mr. Vernon into believing her more sinned against than sinning. Worse still, she entertains herself by making Mrs. Vernon’s brother Reginald fall in love with her, despite all that he knows about her. The skilfully varied letters that fly to and fro between the characters show Lady Susan successful up to the very end, when an unlucky meeting between Reginald and Mrs. Manwaring betrays everything and leaves him free to marry Frederica.
Lady Susan shows no signs of the audience participation that was so characteristic of the Juvenilia. This was no shared family joke, but a private investigation of the problem of evil. Its heroine may be an adulteress but it is an almost heavily moral book. I imagine that the same could almost certainly be said of the original Elinor and Marianne. Here again we have the suggestion of a literary exercise, a cold-blooded study of the effects of over-caution and over-enthusiasm on the heroines’ careers. By the time she revised it, Jane Austen had her favourite audience back, and we have no way of knowing how much of the comedy was written in then. I think the first version was probably a serious attempt by the author to analyse the springs and bases of human behaviour. They were always to fascinate her, but at this point, just for a little while, they failed to amuse. She had learned, before she was twenty, that loneliness is the human condition.
4
1795 had been a year of chequered experience, but 1796 opened gaily with the first letter of Jane Austen’s that has been preserved. It was, naturally, to Cassandra, who was staying with her fiancé’s family at Kintbury, in Berkshire, and, appropriately enough, it described an affair of Jane Austen’s own. “Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” She had been amusing herself by an outrageous flirtation with her friend Mrs. Lefroy’s nephew, Torn Lefroy from Ireland. He was “a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you,” and “has but one fault ... his morning coat is a great deal too light.” So, by the sound of it, were Jane Austen’s feelings about him.
Her Victorian relatives were to defend Jane Austen with rather touching vehemence against old Mrs. Mitford’s remark that she was “the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers”. It is true, as Edward Austen-Leigh points out, that by the time Jane Austen was old enough to hunt husbands, Mrs. Mitford had left the district, but it is also true that the old lady still had friends there. I like to think that this report may have been superficially correct, though basically false. If we take it in conjunction with Jane Austen’s own letters we can see that what was intended as criticism was in fact high praise. It shows how successfully Jane Austen had embarked on her double life. Young ladies were supposed to be pretty, and silly, and on the catch for husbands. Jane Austen had decided to conform. And as “an artist can do nothing slovenly”, she was, naturally, the prettiest and silliest of them all.
The letters give her away. Laughter will keep breaking through. In the next one to Cassandra, she reports that she rather expects Tom Lefroy to propose to her. “I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat.” The young man, perhaps, as young men will, recognised that fatal undercurrent of laughter. He did not propose, but vanished back to Ireland, where he eventually became Lord Chief Justice, and remembered being in love with Jane Austen as a young man. “But it was a boy’s love.” There certainly seem to have been no broken hearts in the business. “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.” And without so much as stopping to dry her eyes, or mop up a non-existent blot on her paper, Jane Austen went on with her light-hearted account of family doings.
It must have been a happy year, despite Tom Fowle’s departure for the West Indies. When Cassandra had returned from her farewell visit to Kintbury, Jane set off by way of London to stay with their prosperous brother Edward, who was settled with his wife and children at a house called Rowling in Kent, which combined the virtues of belonging to her family, the Bridges, and being in comfortable visiting range of his adopted parents, the Knights of Godmersham. Writing from Cork Street on the way to Kent, Jane Austen begins, “Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.” Edward and Frank were with her, and they were all going to Astley’s. Her next letter, dated from Rowling, shows her well acquainted with the place and people. It was obviously not her first visit. But it presented her with a problem by which she was often to be plagued, that of transport. Young ladies did not travel alone, still less in public vehicles. That is why General Tilney’s behaviour in sending the seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland seventy miles across country by herself was so monstrous.
At twenty Jane Austen was dependent on her brothers’ plans for her conveyance home, and naturally her convenience must give way to theirs. “Tomorrow I shall be just like Camilla in Mr. Dubster’s summerhouse; for my Lionel will have taken away the ladder by which I came here.” She was referring to Fanny Burney’s Camilla, which was published that year, and to which she subscribed. She had other problems. “I am in great distress — I cannot determine whether I shall give Richis[4] half a guinea or only five shillings when I go away. Counsel me, amiable Miss Austen, and tell me which will be the most.” On allowances of twenty pounds a year, the Miss Austens could never afford to be lavish, and the curious use of “most” instead of “best” probably shows how this rankled, specially among those rich relatives in Kent.
But life in Kent was always entertaining, with calls, and balls, and plenty of people to laugh about. “Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two.” And, on what might, if the author were not Jane Austen, have been a more serious note, “We went by Bifrons, and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure, the abode of him, on whom I once fondly doted.” Mrs. Mitford’s “butterfly” must have been remembering a flirtation with one of the five suitable sons of the Rev. Mr. Taylor, who lived there. It is a reminder of how little we know about her youth.
But the problem of how to get home was to become acute. Frank, who might have accompanied her, received his sailing orders for the frigate Triton and had to leave forthwith. Henry’s plans, as usual, were uncertain. If Jane could not accompany Frank, Edward would take her to Greenwich and, “My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the temple, or mount guard at St. James.” Unfortunately, Jane’s arrangements depended on a friend of Henry’s, Miss Pearson, to whom he seems to have been briefly engaged at about this time. Miss Pearson was also in Kent, being driven out by Henry, and there was a plan for her to go back to Hampshire with Jane and be introduced to the family. Writing about this, Jane sounded a warning note: “If Miss Pearson should return with me, pray be careful not to expect too much beauty. I will not pretend to say that on a first view, she quite answered the opinion I had formed of her — My mother I am sure will be disappointed, if she does not take great care.”
We do not know whether Miss Pearson did go back to Steventon that autumn, but by November Eliza de Feuillide was writing Philadelphia Walter to say that, “Henry Austen has been in town: he looks thin and ill. I hear his late intended is a most intolerable flirt, and reckoned to give herself great airs. The person who mentioned this to me says she is a pretty wicked looking girl with bright black eyes which pierce through and through.” Eliza was by no means an impartial observer. She had been a widow for two years now, and her letters to Philadelphia Walter show her debating the question of remarriage. Should she abandon “dear liberty, and yet dearer flirta
tion”? She had been visiting a relative and entertaining eleven beaux, but Philadelphia obviously thought she was about to engage herself to James Austen, whose wife had now been dead for more than a year. Eliza was undecided. There was a Lord S — in the picture too. “But it does not signify, I shall certainly escape both peer and parson.”
She was right. In her next letter to Philadelphia she had to report the surprising news that James had engaged himself to his sisters’ friend Mary Lloyd, “who is not either rich or handsome, but very sensible and good-humoured”. Eliza seems to have been a little out of touch with the realities of life in Hampshire, for so far back as September Jane Austen had been writing Cassandra from Kent to ask “which of the Marys will carry the day with my brother James”. By Christmas, Mary Harrison (the other Mary) was out of the running, and James and Mary Lloyd were married in January, 1797.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 5