Meanwhile Jane Austen had got home that autumn without falling “a sacrifice to the arts of some fat woman who would make me drunk with small beer”. She was doubtless able to watch the progress of James’s second courtship for herself. If Miss Pearson in fact went back with her, Jane may at the same time have been watching the dissolution of Henry’s engagement. And she herself was doubtless back in the pleasant Steventon routine, trimming up her caps for the monthly balls at Basingstoke, or for those given by their neighbours in the country, where she acted to the life the part of the pretty, silly young girl.
And all the time, upstairs in the dressing-room with its common-looking carpet, Jane’s piano, and the oval glass between the windows, the pretty, silly girl was hard at work on First Impressions, with Cassandra once more as critic and confidante. Their niece Anna, James’s daughter, who lived with them until her father’s remarriage, remembered later in life that she heard her two aunts reading the book aloud, with gales of laughter, and had threatened to betray the well-kept secret by picking up the names of the characters and repeating them downstairs.
Unfortunately, no copy of this early version of Pride and Prejudice survives. It is a great loss. All we know about First Impressions is that it was the basis of Pride and Prejudice and that, when the veil of secrecy was lifted, it was an immense, and must have been an encouraging, success with the Austen family. And no wonder. The title, as well as common sense, tells us that the main plot of the book must have been the same as that of Pride and Prejudice, with Elizabeth and Darcy disliking each other at first, then warming into love and marriage.
Like Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions is the story of the problems encountered by two sisters on their way to matrimony. But the problems are more interesting ones. In Elinor and Marianne (our Sense and Sensibility), the main handicap of the two girls is their lack of money. In First Impressions the lack of money is compounded by the quite appalling vulgarity of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet’s mother and younger sisters. One longs to know whether, in revising First Impressions, Jane Austen sharpened or softened her effects here. It is a temptation to credit the lines one likes least to the early version; for instance Darcy’s gratuitous rudeness about Elizabeth at their first meeting, and Mr. Bennet’s remark about Mary at the Netherfield ball. But of course it is quite unjustifiable. All we know for sure is that, like Elinor and Marianne it could be, and has been, described as a wish-fulfilment story in which two sisters marry and live happily ever afterwards. It was also, judging by those betraying gales of laughter from the upstairs room, highly entertaining.
And yet its writing must have been interrupted by a disaster that struck the diminished family in the spring of 1797. Instead of Tom Fowle, who was expected home, came a letter breaking the news that he had died of yellow fever in the West Indies. Lord Craven was later to make bad worse by saying that if he had known of the engagement he would never have taken his kinsman to so unhealthy a spot. For the present, Eliza de Feuillide wrote to her Cousin Philadelphia that, “Jane says that her sister behaves with a degree of resolution and propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation.”
It is tempting to recognise a graver note in the last chapters of Pride and Prejudice, and explain it by Cassandra’s bereavement. At least, Jane Austen cannot have stopped working on the book for long, as we have Cassandra’s authority for the fact that the first version was finished in August. It did not long remain a secret from the rest of the family. By November 1st, Mr. Austen was writing to Cadell, a well-established London publisher, offering him “a manuscript novel, comprising 3 volumes, about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina”. It has been argued that the reference to Evelina was fatal to the book’s chances. Although it was nearly twenty years since Fanny Burney’s first novel had been an instantaneous success, publishers must still have been receiving optimistic imitations by “young ladies”. One can hardly blame Cadell, though one must pity him, for rejecting the offer of First Impressions by return of post. At least, in fairness to him, it must be remembered that he had not seen the manuscript. All he had to go on was a letter from an unknown country clergyman. We ought to be grateful to him. The one thing of which we can be sure is that if First Impressions had been accepted and published in 1797, Pride and Prejudice, as we know it, would never have been written. It is a sobering thought.
There are no letters of Jane Austen’s for 1797. Perhaps Cassandra burnt them, as too personal, or, more likely, the two sisters stayed together through the first anguish of Cassandra’s bereavement. We know from the Life that Mrs. Austen and her two daughters paid a visit to Bath in November, probably to stay with the Leigh Perrots, and doubtless to confirm Jane Austen in her dislike of the place. But at least she cannot have taken the rejection of First Impressions too hard, for, according to Cassandra, she started work in November on the revised version of Elinor and Marianne. it was probably a distraction for both sisters, and may also have been a defence against the Leigh Perrots and “the unmeaning luxuries of Bath”. The book was undoubtedly revised again, years later, before it was finally published in 1811, so that we do not know what exactly happened to it in 1797, but it is pleasant to think that what had been an exercise for Jane Austen in the loneliness of Cassandra’s engagement became a distraction for Cassandra in her bereavement. Jane was to hail her sister later as “the finest comic writer of the present age”, and perhaps some of the funnier bits went in at this point, the description of Robert Ferrars’ “person and face, of strong, natural, sterling insignificance”, and his mother whose face had been rescued from “the disgrace of insipidity” by “a lucky contraction of the brow” that gave it “the strong characters of pride and ill nature”. It would never be Jane Austen’s most likable book, but if some miracle were to produce for us its first version, we would probably be amazed at the transformation that she wrought in it over the years.
It was not the success with the Austen family that First Impressions had been. There are no references to it in the surviving letters of these years as there are to First Impressions. “I do not wonder at your wanting to read First Impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, and that so long ago.” But then, Pride and Prejudice, though not, in fact, Jane Austen’s first completed novel, has just the same kind of spontaneous, gleeful first-book joie-de-vivre that made Fanny Burney’s Evelina an instant success. The story of the Bennet sisters is told, throughout, in terms of high comedy, whereas that of the Dashwoods verges at times on tragedy. It is hard to believe that the latter was known to Victorian critics like Charlotte Brontë, who accused Jane Austen of lack of feeling. “The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood; even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition.”
Can Charlotte Brontë possibly have read the scene where Marianne receives Willoughby’s insulting letter, or the whole sickbed episode? It is possible that this very note of high seriousness may have made the book less successful with the humorous Austens, and that they encouraged Jane Austen to increase the comic element of the book as she revised it. She was always intensely interested in her family and friends’ opinions of her books, and though she could be ruthlessly firm with foolish suggestions, like those of Mr. Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, she was probably receptive to sympathetic ones. It is interesting, in this context, to note that in her next book, Susan, (our Northanger Abbey) she returned to the strictly comic vein. Her family, at this point, were all the audience she had, and she needed to keep them with her.
No doubt the notebooks, or scraps of paper, where Elinor and Marianne was turning into Sense and Sensibility travelled back from Bath to Steventon with Mrs. Austen and her daughters in December, but it is doubtful if much more work got done during that eventful month. On December 11th, Eliza de Feuillide wrote Philadelphia about a surprising rumour that “Cassandra was going to be married”, but added, “Jane says not a word about
it.” Jane undoubtedly knew best. No more is heard of this ridiculous rumour, but Eliza de Feuillide, as usual, had marriage in mind. Since James had married, she had been considering the merits of Henry, now safely disengaged from his Miss Pearson. The letter of May 1797, in which she told Philadelphia about Tom Fowle’s death had ended with a description of Henry, who was “now Captain, Paymaster, and Adjutant. He is a very lucky young man and bids fair to possess a considerable share of riches and honours. I believe he has now given up all thoughts of the Church, and he is right for he certainly is not so fit for a parson as a soldier.” By the summer there was a Mr. Courthope, too, about whose prospects she would like Philadelphia to tell her. As to Henry, she thought she had changed her mind. “The lady is so well pleased with her present situation that she cannot find in her heart to change it, and says in her giddy way that independence and the homage of half a dozen are preferable to subjection and the attachment of a single individual.” She visited the Warren Hastings that summer and “made one conquest, who has between thirty and forty thousand per annum, but unfortunately he has also a wife, so that I cannot even indulge myself in a little flirtation.” It sounds extraordinarily like Lady Susan.
By the winter, the delights of merry widowhood must have palled. Eliza wrote to Warren Hastings in December to announce her engagement to Henry, “an acquiescence which I have withheld for more than two years”. Three days later, on the thirty-first of December, she married Henry in the Church of St. Marylebone. Neither of the witnesses was an Austen, and there is no record of any of the family’s being present. The authors of the Life comment dryly that the news of the engagement “can hardly have given unmixed pleasure”, and say nothing about the circumstances of the marriage.
We have no further clue as to how the Austens felt about Henry’s marriage to a frivolous cousin ten years his senior, but it seems likely that it was a painful time for them all. Tom Fowle had only died that spring, and Cassandra must have been thinking of the wedding that would never take place. And if Jane had consciously used Eliza’s letters as a model for Lady Susan’s, she can hardly have failed to be disconcerted when her favourite brother married the original. She probably sighed, and, one hopes, smiled, and put Lady Susan “on the shelf” like a later book. Fortitude was always to be one of the great virtues for Jane Austen. I have no doubt that she behaved perfectly, and watched Cassandra do likewise, but she must have been laying down a stock of deep-felt experience, which was to show itself in the silent endurance of many of her heroines. Man must work, she might well have said, and woman must not weep. She demonstrated the value of this precept in the stories of Elinor, and Fanny, and Anne.
Henry’s own story seems to have had a happy ending. Eliza, who had always been a careful mother to her poor little backward boy, proved a good wife, and, later on, Jane’s letters record happy visits to them in London. Cassandra was certainly visiting them by 1800, for a letter of Jane’s refers to her comments on a Mrs. Marriott who had been a witness at the wedding. If Eliza Austen sat for the portrait of Mary Crawford as well as that of Lady Susan, a comment of their creator’s is much to the point. “Impartiality would not have denied to Miss Crawford’s nature, that participation of the general nature of women, which would lead her to adopt the opinions of the man she loved and respected, as her own.” Henry and Eliza’s story is that of Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford, but with a happy ending. Only James’s wife Mary never forgot her husband’s earlier flirtation with Eliza and later refused to let her stepdaughter Anna visit the Henry Austens in London.
That cannot have been an altogether happy winter at Steventon, but still there was the farmer with his plough, “meaning to have spring again”, and still there was the social pretence to be kept up, and work to be done. We know from Cassandra’s note that Susan was begun in 1797, so presumably Jane Austen had already settled to the working habit by which she started a new book while revising the old one. With Marianne to suffer for, and Susan (our Catherine Morland) to laugh at, there must have been plenty of occupation in the upstairs dressing-room. Presumably Anna Austen was now living with her father and stepmother, so there was also more privacy. Unfortunately, Anna and Mary Austen never got on very well, but then Mary was to prove the most difficult of the sisters-in-law, and it is perhaps not surprising that Anna, confided to her care at the age of four, should have grown up something of a problem child, to be described later by her Aunt Jane as “quite an Anna with variations”.
Jane Austen’s letters begin again, on a sober note, in April 1798, when she wrote to condole with their cousin, Philadelphia Walter, on the death of her father. A very proper letter, this one must have been a comfort to Jane Austen’s Victorian relatives: “The goodness which made him valuable on earth, will make him blessed in heaven.” And then, on a more characteristic note of realism, “This comfort [of knowing him to be in heaven] must be heightened by the consideration of the little enjoyment he was able to receive from this world for some time past.” A tragedy closer to home at this time was the death, in a carriage accident, of Lady Williams, the Austen’s cousin Jane Cooper, who had gone to school with Cassandra and Jane. No letter of Jane Austen’s on this occasion survives, but she was not to use a carriage accident in her novels until her last work of all, Sanditon, written in 1817, when she was herself dying.
A more cheerful letter, dated in October 1798, shows that the visits to Kent continued. Edward Austen’s adopted father, Mr. Knight, had died in 1794. In 1797, Edward had agreed, after a high-flown exchange of letters with his adoptive mother, to move into the big house at Godmersham, while she settled in dowager style nearby. If life at Rowling had been easy, life at Godmersham was luxurious. This autumn visit was the Austens’ first since the move. All four of them went, but Cassandra (who was Edward’s favourite sister as Jane was Henry’s) stayed behind when the others left in October. Edward’s wife Elizabeth had just produced one of the eleven children she was to bear in seventeen years, and there were “patients, little and great” to be looked after. The Austen sisters were always in demand when it came to sick-nursing.
Mrs. Austen, too, had been suffering from one of her ailments, and Jane wrote a comfortable letter to Cassandra from the Bull and George, Dartford, to report a successful first day’s journey. It had been marred by one crisis. Her writing and dressing boxes had been accidentally put into the wrong chaise and had been retrieved three miles on their way to the West Indies. “No part of my property could have been such a prize before,” wrote Jane, “for in my writing-box was all my worldly wealth, £7, and my dear Harry’s deputation.” It did not occur to her to mention which, if any, of her irreplaceable manuscripts had nearly been shipped off to the West Indies. Her “dear Harry” was one of their neighbours, the Digweed brothers, who figure a good deal in the correspondence of these years, and the “deputation” was his permission to shoot over the grounds of Steventon Manor, which his family rented from Edward Austen. No doubt Edward was still in the process of taking over his adoptive mother’s affairs.
Writing again three days later, Jane had received a good report of Cassandra’s invalids, but could not speak quite so favourably of hers. Their mother had been reduced to taking “twelve drops of laudanum ... as a composer”, and James was being tiresome. He “seems to have taken to his old trick of coming to Steventon in spite of Mary’s reproaches, for he was here before breakfast and is now paying us a second visit.” It was bad luck that James and his difficult wife Mary were the ones who lived almost too close, a mile and a half away at Deane. But at least it meant that Jane and Cassandra’s dear friend Martha, Mary’s sister, was often visiting them, as at this time.
Meanwhile Jane Austen had been shopping at Basingstoke on the way home, while her mother was ministered to by a Mr. Lyford, a surgeon. Jane had bought some Japan ink, “and next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend”. It was October now, and the seven pounds that she had nearly lost on the journey
must have been the remainder of her annual twenty pounds, which was paid quarterly. It was necessary to think twice about such expenses as two and threepence a yard for flannel. “I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance.” There is an undernote of unhappiness in this batch of letters. In the first one, Jane mentioned that she was “by no means unhappy” on the journey, and in the next described herself as “not sorry to be busy”. Clearly there was something the matter, and Cassandra knew about it. It may simply have been that, as always, Jane missed Cassandra when they were parted, or it may refer to some other trouble. Had another young man proved elusive?
This passing depression probably accounts for a sharp note that shocked the Victorian kinsmen. “Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” Jane Austen was always realistic about the hazards of her married contemporaries’ constant child-bearing, but this comment certainly verges on heartlessness. Odder still is a question addressed to Cassandra. “Dame Tilbury’s daughter has lain in. Shall I give her any of your baby clothes?” It seems an extraordinarily cold-blooded reference to the trousseau she must have helped Cassandra work on only the year before. But then, the Austens were a practical family. James’s wife Mary was expecting her first child and Jane, reporting two deaths in childbed to Cassandra, went on to say, “We have not regaled Mary with this news.” A note at the end of this letter reports that Mary has been safely delivered of a boy. “My mother had desired to know nothing of it before it should be all over, and we were clever enough to prevent her having any suspicion of it.” At fifty-nine, Mrs. Austen clearly felt that she had had enough of these crises, and one can hardly blame her.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 6