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By the winter of 1798, life at Steventon Rectory had changed enormously. Cassandra had taken over the housekeeping by now, and Jane wrote to her in Kent to boast, semi-comically as usual, about her own prowess as substitute in her absence. “I am very grand indeed ... I carry about the keys of the wine and closet, and twice since I began this letter have had orders to give in the kitchen.” She talked knowledgeably about ragout veal, haricot mutton and the killing of pigs, and when Mr. Lyford, their Basingstoke surgeon, came to see their mother was “not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a spare-rib, and a pudding”. It sounds, for those days, a significantly frugal regime, but she was probably glad of Mr. Lyford’s company, for an earlier letter had reported, “My father and I dined by ourselves. How strange!” The rectory must have seemed very large and empty, with even Cassandra away.
Jane Austen had other things on her mind besides the loneliness of a daughter at home. Her next letter reports a meeting with Mrs. Lefroy, who never mentioned her nephew’s name. “And I was too proud to make any enquiries.” Luckily Mr. Austen asked about Tom Lefroy, and thus Jane learned that he had gone to London on his way to Ireland. The “boy’s love” was apparently over, and perhaps this defection was the reason for Jane’s lack of spirits. It is one thing to decide not to accept a proposal, and quite another not to receive it. There may have been more to the affair than the light tone of the 1796 letters suggests, and moreover, according to the authors of the Life, by 1798 Tom Lefroy was tacitly engaged to someone else, whom he married the following year. Years later, when she was dying, Jane Austen was to write with bracing sympathy to her niece Fanny, who was in a similar situation. “Why should you be living in dread of his marrying somebody else? — (Yet, how natural!) — You did not choose to have him yourself; why not allow him to take comfort where he can?” But it was natural for Fanny to mind, and Jane Austen knew all about it.
She had her distractions, that autumn of 1798. A young clergyman, identified as Samuel Blackall of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had been staying with the Lefroys and had written a rather Collinsish letter, which Mrs. Lefroy showed to Jane, and Jane quoted to Cassandra. “I am very sorry to hear of Mrs. Austen’s illness,” Mr. Blackall had written. “It would give me particular pleasure to have an opportunity of improving my acquaintance with that family — with a hope of creating to myself a nearer interest. But at present I cannot indulge any expectation of it.”
“This is rational enough,” commented Jane, “there is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before ... it is therefore most probable that our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me.” Jane Austen was perhaps beginning to learn that young men do not much like the suspicion of feminine laughter. It is pleasant to know that she had the last laugh, in 1813, when the Reverend Mr. Blackall married a Miss Lewis. “I should very much like to know what sort of a woman she is. He was a piece of perfection, noisy perfection himself which I always recollect with regard ... I would wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn and rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn — fond of cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, and a green window blind at night.”
Tom Lefroy, and Mr. Blackall, and who knows how many others, taught Jane Austen a lesson from which she profited in drawing one type of heroine. Catherine Morland “was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
This is Jane Austen’s most overt comment on the classic predicament of the intelligent female, and it is comforting to think that although she lets Catherine Morland and Fanny Price win their heroes, at last, by the sheer weight of their devotion, she still gets her, and our, greatest pleasure out of the witty heroines who give as good as they get. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma may possibly sometimes seem pert (Victorian readers certainly thought so) but at least they never seem stupid, and one cannot help feeling that their marriages stand a better chance of success, for instance, than Henry Tilney’s with his doting Catherine. Did he manage to educate her before the two of them degenerated into a Mr. and Mrs. Bennet? And, similarly, when Fanny realised how much more intelligent she was than her beloved Edmund, had she the sense to keep quiet about it?
Life at Steventon was quiet enough, with Cassandra’s visit in Kent prolonging itself like the endless war that was beginning to affect the cost of living. In November 1798 Jane wrote, “There is to be a ball at Basingstoke next Thursday. Our assemblies have very kindly declined ever since we laid down the carriage, so that dis-convenience and disinclination to go have kept pace together.” To give up one’s carriage was a drastic move, although, in fact, the Austen girls went right on going to balls, no doubt “taken up” in the carriages of their friends.
Their brother James kept his carriage, and it is possible that about now the Austen girls were beginning to feel the difference made by his occupation of Deane. Mr. Austen had made the same kind of sacrifice, in giving him this living, that Mr. Morland offered to his son James when he engaged himself to Isabella Thorpe. But the living that Isabella scorned brought in about four hundred pounds a year, where James Austen had married for the first time on an income of three hundred pounds, including an allowance from his wife’s parents, which was continued after her death. The curacy of Deane was worth fifty pounds, and the increase in James’s income meant a proportionate diminution of his father’s. It was, perhaps, beginning to strike the Austen sisters that he and his difficult Mary were leading a rather more luxurious life than the family at Steventon.
Charles, the youngest of the Austens, had been commissioned as lieutenant in December 1797, so, with the exception of poor George, all the boys must have been pretty well self-sufficient by now, but to counter that Mr. Austen had given up taking pupils, so that the family of four were living on the income from Steventon, plus a tiny income of Mrs. Austen’s, which she later estimated as a hundred and sixteen pounds a year, and the interest on a thousand pounds which Tom Fowle had left to Cassandra. The farming of the glebe must have been more important than ever, and the name of John Bond, who managed the farm, appears a good deal in the letters of this period. The rise in prices for farm products must have been the Austens’ only cushion against the general inflation of wartime, and John Bond was Mr. Austen’s William Larkins, and as indispensable as the latter was to Mr. Knightley. After reporting her solitary dinner with her father, Jane Austen went on to say, “He and John Bond are now very happy together, for I have just heard the heavy step of the latter along the passage.” Was Mr. Austen beginning to feel his position as one man among three women? Perhaps he was one of those men who find serious conversation with women difficult, and with their daughters almost impossible. This would go far to explain the dearth of references to him in Jane Austen’s letters.
By 1798, Tysoe Saul Hancock’s gloomy prediction, years earlier, had acquired its first hint of truth. “I fear George will find it easier to get a family than to provide for them,” he had written. So far, the successful launching in life of all the sons but his own godson, George, seemed to have proved him wrong, but there had been no room for saving in the budget of that active family at Steventon Rectory and, as a result, there can have been little or no possibility of dowries for the daughters. Tom Fowle need not have gone to the West Indies, Tom Lefroy might have stayed, Mr. Blackall might well have tried to create a “nearer interest” if there had only been some money to offset that dangerous hint of mockery.
On the other hand, the gift of laughter must have been an enormous comfort in those quiet days at the rectory. It was probably very much easier to bear with Mary Austen w
hen one had Isabella Thorpe growing in one’s mind. And life was not all minor economies like Irish linen at three and six a yard. There were balls, still, and books to buy, though Jane Austen did not much approve of her father’s purchase of their friend Egerton Brydges’ new book, Arthur Fitzalbini. “There is very little story, and what there is told in a strange, unconnected way. There are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated.” With three novels of her own finished (counting Lady Susan), she was beginning to criticise like a professional.
It was not only books that she criticised. Both Elizabeth and Mary Austen had recently had babies and she had a sharp comparison to make. “Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy enough in her appearance ... Elizabeth was really a pretty object with her nice clean cap put on so tidily and her dress so uniformly white and orderly.” Criticising her least favourite sister-in-law, Jane Austen must temporarily have forgotten the contrast she herself often drew between the luxuries of Kent and the austerities of Hampshire. “People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the world, that I have no patience with them — Kent is the only place for happiness, everybody is rich there.” Elizabeth, of course, was Edward’s wife, and doubtless had a large staff at Godmersham to see to it that her cap was clean and her dress “uniformly white and orderly”.
In Hampshire, one economised. “I took the liberty a few days ago of asking your black velvet bonnet to lend me its cawl, which it very readily did, and by which I have been enabled to give a considerable improvement of dignity to my cap, which was before too nidgetty to please me.” Jane meant to wear it at Thursday’s Basingstoke ball, for which she was to stay at Manydown with the Misses Bigg, who doubtless sent their carriage for her. Later, she changed her mind about the trimmings of the cap. In the end it “makes me look more like Lady Conyngham now than it did before, which is all that one lives for now”. Lady Conyngham, the handsome daughter of a rich London shopkeeper, had married an Irish peer and was later to oust Lady Hertford as George IV’s mistress. Jane Austen was evidently not above reading the gossip columns of newspapers and magazines.
There was news of the sailor brothers. Frank wrote cheerfully from Cadiz, and Charles “begins to feel the dignity of ill-usage”. He meant to write to their cousin by marriage, Sir Thomas Williams, about his prospects, while Mr. Austen would write to Admiral Gambier (one of the Lords of the Admiralty) who “must already have received so much satisfaction from his acquaintance and patronage of Frank, that he will be delighted I dare say to have another of the family introduced to him”. Those were the days when promotion in the Navy, as elsewhere, went largely by patronage, and luckily for the Austens, they had just enough “connection” to under-write Francis’s and Charles’s obvious competence at their job.
Jane Austen had actually walked the mile and a half to Deane by herself. “I do not know that I ever did such a thing in my life before.” It was the day after her twenty-third birthday and she may have been beginning to think of herself as an old maid. The same letter painted an austere picture of their quiet family life. “We dine now at half after three, and have done dinner I suppose before you begin — We drink tea at half after six — I am afraid you will despise us — My father reads Cowper to us in the evening, to which I listen when I can.” But then, were things so much more frivolous in Kent? “How do you spend your evenings? —I guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her and that Edward goes to sleep.”
Life at Steventon would be brightened by the opening of a circulating library announced in “a very civil note from Mrs. Martin” to Jane Austen. She must have been known in the district as the most bookish member of the family. “My mother finds the money — Mary subscribes too, which I am glad of, but hardly expected — As an inducement to subscribe Mrs. Martin tells us that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. etc. — She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great novel-readers and are not ashamed of being so — but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her subscribers.”
The remark is a useful reminder that, according to Cassandra, the first version of Northanger Abbey was written “about the years 1797 and 1798”. While Mr. Austen read aloud Cowper, Jane Austen probably retired quietly into her own world and consoled herself for Cassandra’s absence with the adventures of Susan, who was to become Catherine Morland. Perhaps the day they received Mrs. Martin’s “civil note” she sat down and wrote the first draft of her famous defence of the novel: “Only a novel ... Only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ... only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
Obviously this passage was changed in a later revision, since Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda was not published until 1801, but all the evidence suggests that the revision of Susan was very much less drastic than that of First Impressions and Elinor and Marianne. If it were not for Cassandra’s authority to the contrary, one would naturally assume that Northanger Abbey (or Susan) was the logical successor to the Juvenilia. This, of course, would mean that it was written directly after Lady Susan, an absurdity which thoroughly confirms Cassandra’s dating. Jane Austen did not in the least mind using the same names over again, but she would surely never have given the same one to two heroines running.
But though the lack of revision makes Northanger Abbey sometimes seem like an earlier work than Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, there is an obvious and remarkable development in the treatment of the heroine. The days of wish-fulfilment books about two sisters are over. In the first two novels, the action is seen and understood largely through the intelligence of the heroines, although, as always, Jane Austen shows consummate artistry in the way she slides in and out of their minds. But in Northanger Abbey she has taken a step back from her heroine and is trying a new method, or rather one that she had not used since the last of the Juvenilia, the unfinished story of another Catherine. It is curious that biographers have tended to use Catherine Morland’s early experiences as illustrative of Jane Austen’s own, for of all the heroines, she is the one from whom Jane Austen, and therefore the reader, seems most remote. The whole comic opening puts her in her place as a spoof heroine; she is never provided with a real confidante, for Isabella Thorpe is a parody of the breed, and Eleanor Tilney hardly comes alive to take her place. In fact, Henry Tilney is the nearest thing she has to a confidante, and the scene where he finds her in his dead mother’s bedroom and gently exposes the absurdity of her ideas goes far to explain, and make possible, their eventual marriage.
But then, Catherine is very far, in fact, from being the goose she appears at first. As always, Jane Austen is handling her story on many different levels at once, and we gradually realise that Catherine, for all her absurdities, is well endowed with what her contemporaries would have called “bottom” and we might call character. Like Anne Elliot, she is not afraid to step forward and take her own line when she feels it necessary. It may be partly infatuation that makes her run after the Tilneys when John Thorpe has given them a false message on her behalf, but it is also good manners. And, in the end, as several critics have pointed out, Jane Austen vindicates even her folly at Northanger Abbey. She suspected General Tilney of being a villain for all the wrong reasons, but he finally proved himself just that by turning her out, if not into the snow, like the heroine of a Victorian melodrama, but still under comparable circumstances. And again Catherine behaves with creditable composure. The seventeen-year-old girl who left home for the first time to go to Bath, and who imagined so many horrors at Northanger Abbey, has grown up fast. The lonely journey “had no terrors for her”, and — one of Jane Austen’s deliciously realistic notes — “Her youth, civil manners and liberal pay, procured her all the attention that a travell
er like herself could require.” If Eleanor had not thought to lend her some money, Jane Austen suggests, the journey would have been a very different affair, and herein lies the worst of General Tilney’s behaviour. Jane Austen has often been attacked for her emphasis on economic motives, and this sentence seems to me to be a locus classicus for the defence. Of course she recognised the importance of money; anyone who does not is either saint or fool, and she was neither. But she kept it, always, in its place. Her heroines will not marry for money, but they often cannot marry without it, and Catherine’s youth and civil manners might not have been enough to ensure her good treatment, if they had not been reinforced by her lavish tipping.
In its final version, Northanger Abbey is both a better and a more enjoyable book than its near contemporary, Sense and Sensibility. Instead of Johnsonian moralising, it gives us the glint of irony; instead of dull Edward Ferrars, we get perhaps Jane Austen’s most engaging hero, Henry Tilney, the only one, in my view, into whom she put anything much of herself. Heroes, of course, are obviously a problem for a female author, as heroines are for a male one. In fact, the authoress’s position is the more difficult, since, in society as at present constituted, the male is expected to be the protagonist. Jane Austen varied her approach to this crucial problem from book to book. Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon are little more than lay figures, while Darcy has something of the young girl’s dream hero about him. He anticipates Charlotte Bronte’s saturnine Rochester and all his tribe of descendants. With Henry Tilney Jane Austen tried something new. She gave him her own intelligence and opinions, and then, incorrigibly, laughed at him for them, as in the discussions of the picturesque and the use of language. He is the only man in her books who speaks with her voice, for Edmund Bertram is a lay figure again, while Knightley is a most interesting and satisfactory development of Darcy, the Rochester figure, into a sensible man, and Wentworth obviously owes much to the beloved sailor brothers, and something, perhaps, to the unknown, romantic figure in her own life.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 7