Henry Tilney is one of the liveliest and most convincing men ever created by a woman, and it is no wonder if many (male) critics think him thrown away on his Catherine. Jane Austen first created him in her early twenties, when she was still unreconciled to the problems of the intelligent woman in a world dominated by men. It is significant that it is in Northanger Abbey that she sings the mock-praises of ignorance. “A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” In First Impressions, she had poured her intelligence into her heroine, allowed her to challenge the hero in the battle of wits, and of the sexes, and actually to come to terms with him at last, like Millamant in The Way of the World. In Northanger Abbey she reversed the process. Henry Tilney’s was the intelligent, educated mind; Catherine’s the untrained intelligence. One of the great pleasures of the book is the sight of Catherine succumbing to Henry’s quality (as well as to his good looks), and then seeing him fall in love with her love for him.
The book also has some of Jane Austen’s happiest comic scenes and characters. Mrs. Allen and the odious Thorpes are sketched, but more light-heartedly, by the master hand that drew Mrs. Norris and the Bates. Perhaps, with this book, she had resumed her old habit of family reading aloud. At all events, its composition was undoubtedly interrupted by a piece of good news the Austens received on Christmas Eve of 1798. Writing exultantly to Cassandra, Jane was able to report that their father had received a favourable answer to his letter to Admiral Gambier about Frank and Charles. It is a remarkable comment on the efficiency of both post and civil service at the end of the eighteenth century. On December 18th Jane had said, “My Father will write to Admiral Gambier.” By the 24th, she could write to report the receipt of a friendly and encouraging answer, and go on, “There! I may now finish my letter and go and hang myself, for I am sure I can neither write not do anything which will not appear insipid to you after this.” Having thus reminded us of how very much the Austens cared about each other, Jane did, of course, go on to describe her visit to Manydown, and the ball, which “was very thin, but by no means unpleasant ... Mr. Calland ... stood every now and then behind Catherine and me to be talked to and abused for not dancing. We teased him, however, into it at last.” No doubt, having finished her letter to Cassandra, Jane Austen picked up another small piece of paper and added a touch or two to her picture of the Thorpes.
It is pleasant to know that even at the advanced age of twenty-three, Jane Austen had found herself capable of dancing twenty dances without any fatigue. “From my slender enjoyment of the Ashford balls (as assemblies for dancing) I had not thought myself equal to it, but in cold weather and with few couples I fancy I could just as well dance for a week together as for half an hour.” Hampshire clearly had one advantage over rich Kent. It was full of old friends.
In Kent, Cassandra, too, had been to a ball and had actually supped with Prince William of Gloucester, son of the secret marriage of one of King George III’s disreputable brothers. This meeting had shocked a Kent connection of theirs. Mrs. Cage, who had, according to Jane Austen, “all those kind of foolish and incomprehensible feelings which would make her fancy herself uncomfortable in such a party”. Characteristically, Jane Austen goes on, “I love her, however, in spite of all her nonsense.” For Jane Austen, laughter never precluded love, but merely kept it healthy. Her attitude here, and in a later letter, is the worldly, realistic one of the eighteenth century. In 1801 she reported that Eliza Fowle had met her husband’s kinsman Lord Craven (who had provided that fatal job for Tom Fowle) and “found his manners very pleasing indeed. The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park, seems to be the only surprising circumstance about him.” It is no wonder that Jane Austen’s novels sometimes shocked the Victorians. She took for granted things they preferred to ignore.
But there were much more important events for the Austen girls, that winter of 1798, than encounters with minor royalty, or tarnished nobility. Admiral Gambier had wasted no time. By December 28th, Jane Austen could report triumphantly that “Frank is made”. He was now a Commander, and appointed to H.M. Sloop Petterel, while Charles’s wish had also been granted and he had been removed to a frigate. Best of all, it meant that they could expect Charles home for a visit, and indeed Jane hoped he would arrive in time for Lady Dorchester’s ball, but, “Charles never came. Naughty Charles! I suppose he could not get superseded in time.” As usual, Jane Austen was taken to the ball by friends, but does not seem to have enjoyed it overmuch. “One of my gayest actions was sitting down two dances in preference to having Lord Bolton’s eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured.”
“I do not think I was much in request,” reports Jane the realist. “People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it.” There may, perhaps, have been a connection between this discovery, her brother James’s decision, reported in the same letter, to give dinner parties, and a family plan to go to Brighton in the summer. Were the Austens making serious attempts, with family dinners and holidays, to find husbands for their daughters? If so, Jane’s reaction was predictable. “I dread the idea of going to Brighton as much as you do,” she wrote, “but am not without hopes that something may happen to prevent it.” So far as we know, something did. What we do not know is whether Brighton was written into First Impressions as the scene of Lydia Bennet’s disastrous visit before or after this episode. There was a military camp there at this time, as well as the Prince of Wales’s set, and E. M. Forster must have missed Jane Austen’s reaction to the proposed visit when he wrote his curiously unpleasant review of the Letters. “Lydia Bennet is all pervading: balls, officers, giggling, dresses, officers, balls, fill sheet after sheet until every one except Kitty grows weary ... The young girl dances and her eyes sparkle duly, but they are observant and hard; officers, dances, officers, giggling, balls.” Jane Austen’s eyes were always observant, but were they ever hard?
In fact, Jane Austen was plagued a good deal about this time by eye trouble and some critics have used this to explain the dearth of descriptions in her books. It was a weakness that afflicted her all her adult life, and her niece Caroline Austen tells us that she used to play at cup-and-ball, “when she suffered from weak eyes and could not work or read for long together”. If she was, in fact, short-sighted it would certainly help to account for the rather generalised nature of some of her descriptions, “the white glare of Bath” in Persuasion or the “something white and womanish” in Sanditon. She seems to have had expert advice about her eyes, later in life, but never wore the primitive spectacles of her time, and it is no wonder if the fine needlework and careful copying of which she did so much strained her eyes. We have no idea of what the Austen family budget for “working candles” was, but it was almost certainly a frugal one, and it is safe to assume that once dusk fell their lighting was, to put it mildly, inadequate. There would be no retiring to the peaceful dressing-room upstairs once it was dark; the family would gather together round what light there was. It is one of the reasons for the prevalent habit of reading aloud, which undoubtedly had such a beneficial effect on Jane Austen’s style. If modern authors read aloud more, and heard their work read, they might write more tidily. Jane Austen herself read aloud admirably and one of her nieces said her rendering of Evelina was as good as a play.
The small batch of letters for 1798 and 1799 contains news of the Austen girls’ best friends. On the way home from Lady Dorchester’s ball, Jane had spent a happy couple of nights with James and Mary at Deane, sharing a bed with their dear friend Martha Lloyd, Mary’s sister. “The bed did exceedingly well for us, both to lie awake in and talk till two o’clock and to sleep in the rest of the night. I love Martha better than ever ...” In the same letter, Jane speaks of Catherine Bigg, who “congratulated me last night on Frank’s promotion, as if she really felt the joy she talked of”. Like Emma, the Austen girls amused themselves in “making matches” for their friends and relations. This let
ter ends on a similar note: “My father and mother made the same match for you last night, and are very much pleased with it. He is a beauty of my mother’s.” Marriage was incontrovertibly the business of young ladies, as well as, possibly, their pleasure. Critics who attack Jane Austen for making it the main subject of her novels are simply failing to take into account the hard facts of her time. Writing today, would she, I wonder, have enjoyed herself as much describing her heroines’ attempts to become Prime Ministers or efficient principals of women’s colleges?
6
In May 1799, Cassandra’s long visit to Godmersham was over at last. She must have returned to Steventon in company with Edward, Elizabeth and their children, and the Edward Austens promptly took Mrs. Austen and Jane off to Bath with them, along with their two eldest children, while Cassandra minded the others. Maiden aunts had their uses. Edward was to take the waters at Bath, since he was either the least robust of the brothers or the only one with leisure and money enough to indulge a penchant for “stomach complaints, faintnesses, and sicknesses”. His sister’s tone, when she writes about his health, or lack of it, tends towards the same dryness she uses of their mother. “She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present; but I have not much compassion for colds in the head without fever or sore throat.” As for Jane, she must finally have taken advice about her eyes, for she reports that she finds no difficulty in “doing” them in their lodgings.
In Bath there were the Leigh Perrots to be visited. “My uncle is quite surprised at my hearing from you so often.” There were also a great many commissions to be executed for family and friends at home. The letters are full of bonnets and fruit trimmings, patterns of lace and problems about shoes. On what might be a graver note, Jane reports meeting an old acquaintance: “Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.” She was not old enough yet to find death dreadful.
She also met a “very young man, just entered of Oxford”, who, “wears spectacles, and has heard that Evelina was written by Dr. Johnson”. Perhaps in the great Doctor’s honour, she tried a sentence in the style of Mrs. Piozzi[5] in her next letter. “I had some thoughts of writing the whole of my letter in her style, but I believe I shall not.” Did thoughts of Henry Tilney, who was so “nice” in his views of style help to dissuade her? She was thinking about other types of style too and had decided that “it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.” And then, back to her writing, she urged Cassandra not to let Martha Lloyd read First Impressions again. “She is very cunning, but I saw through her design; she means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it.” There is always an unmistakable note of confidence when Jane Austen speaks of First Impressions.
Writing and its mechanics went on being a preoccupation. “I do not know what is the matter with me today, but I cannot write quietly; I am always wandering away into some exclamation or other.” And, in the next paragraph, “We walked to Weston one evening last week, and liked it very much. Liked what very much? Weston? No, walking to Weston. I have not expressed myself properly, but I hope you will understand me.” She may not have polished and repolished her letters as she did her novels, but they show the same passionate search for the precise word, the exact effect. It was all invaluable writing practice. As she herself said, on a frivolous occasion, “An artist cannot do anything slovenly.”
Their summer plans were still not settled. “I should like to make a compromise with Adlestrop, Harden, and Bookham that Martha’s spending the summer at Steventon should be considered as our respective visits to them all.” The Brighton plan had been abandoned in favour of a round of family visits to which Jane and Cassandra apparently looked forward with almost as little enthusiasm. There were Leigh connections living at all three places, but in fact their summer was to be worse than they could have expected. In August, Mrs. Austen’s sister-in-law, Jane Leigh Perrot, was accused of shoplifting in Bath. It appears to have been an attempt at blackmail by an unscrupulous shopkeeper, who took it for granted that the Leigh Perrots would pay hush money rather than risk prosecution and the chance, under the barbarous law of the day, of Mrs. Leigh Perrot’s being sentenced to death, if found guilty, with a probable commutation into transportation to Australia. It is impossible not to respect the Leigh Perrots for the line they took. Denying the absurd charge absolutely, they refused to compound in any way, and Mrs. Leigh Perrot was committed for trial at the next Assizes. Since these did not take place until the following spring, she spent the winter in lodgings attached to Ilchester gaol. Her devoted husband stayed there with her, and she hoped to have James Austen, who was generally assumed to be their heir, to support her at her trial, describing him as “a perfect son to me in affection and his firm friendship all through this trying business”. Unluckily, James’s horse fell with him and he broke his leg just before the Assizes, so that neither he nor his wife Mary could be there. Mrs. Austen, whose own health must have been precarious as usual, wrote offering her the company of Cassandra and Jane, but this was declined. “To have two young creatures gazed at in a public court would cut one to the very heart.” James’s was to prove an unlucky accident for the Austens.
Mrs. Leigh Perrot, having kept her ailing husband going through the anxious months of waiting with sympathy and James’s Powders,[6] was supported at the trial by her own cousin, Penelope Cholmeley, and was honourably acquitted by a jury after seven and a half minutes’ deliberation. “The frightful expense I cannot estimate,” she wrote. “What a comfort that we have no children.” And, also to her cousin, Penelope’s brother, “Your sister I know has a heart warm to every affectionate tie — indeed she well proved her friendship. Others talked, and wrote of it, perhaps felt it — but it was a distant glow, or rather a little spark which required more trouble to blow up than the thing was worth.” Mrs. Austen made a mistake when she let James’s accident or her perennial ill health keep her from her sister-in-law’s side, but it was a respectable mistake. It is obvious from her daughter’s letters that none of the family really liked Jane Leigh Perrot, and the fact that she and her husband were rich already, and had expectations of more, may have acted as a kind of high-minded, backhanded argument against going.
No letters of Jane Austen’s for this period of crisis survive, so we do not know what she and Cassandra thought about being offered as gaol companions to their unpopular aunt. It is curious to think of the Dickensian chapters Jane Austen would have been equipped to write if Mrs. Leigh Perrot had accepted the offer, but it seems unlikely that she would have written them. She did, in fact, go round a gaol in Canterbury later on, with her brother Edward, who was a visiting magistrate, and wrote about it to Cassandra, but she knew her province, and kept to it. Only Sanditon, apart from the Juvenilia, is capable of comprehending a prison scene, and Sanditon is unfinished.
By the time that Jane Austen’s letters take up again, cheerfully, in October 1800, the family drama had been long played out, and the Leigh Perrots had resumed their comfortable, self-contained life, divided between Bath and their house, Scarlets, in Berkshire. Apparently, relations with the Austens were as friendly as ever, but the Leigh Perrots did not forget easily.
Edward Austen had been visiting his parents in the autumn of 1800 and had taken Cassandra home with him to Godmersham. He had left Jane with the reasonably pleasant task of distributing his “charity” to the poor of the district. It was not, in fact, exactly Jane’s line. In an earlier letter she had admitted her own shortcomings as a visitor of the poor. “I called yesterday on Betty Londe, who enquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, which I am sorry to have merited, and from which I will profit.” And again, without enthusiasm: “Of my charities to the poor since I came home you shall have a faithful account.”
It was a curious situation and, with luck, one that Jan
e Austen was equipped to find amusing. Edward’s adoptive father, Thomas Knight, had given his real father the living of Steventon. Now, as Mr. Knight’s heir, Edward was lord of the manor and was presumably doing his best, through his sisters, to make up for Mr. Austen’s constrained deficiencies in the charitable line. It does not seem to have occurred to him until a much later date that he might do something more positive about his family’s straitened circumstances. When his sisters went to Godmersham they tended to get “presents” of money both from Edward and from his adoptive mother, old Mrs. Knight, of whom they were very fond. They were delighted to get these presents: “Her very agreeable present will make my circumstances quite easy,” but there is all the difference in the world between presents, however lavish, and an assured increase of income, however small. It is impossible, in this connection, not to remember the superb discussion between the Dashwoods about what John Dashwood had promised to do for his mother and half-sisters. After much deliberation they came down at last in favour of the odd present. “Whatever I may give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance than a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge their style of living if they felt sure of a larger income, and would not be sixpence the richer for it at the end of the year ... A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money.”
Of course the Dashwoods are very far from being the Edward Austens. They are merely one more instance of how Jane Austen took the painful grit of experience and transmuted it into her pearl. But this and other passages in the novels serve to illustrate the quite unusual family solidarity of the Austens. Ever since the days of the Juvenilia, they had been used to what Caroline Austen later described as Jane’s habit of “imagining for her neighbours impossible contingencies, by relating in prose or verse some trifling incident, coloured to her own fancy”. And they were intelligent enough to recognise the all-important colouring of fancy. Jane did not need to tell them that “it was her desire to create, not to reproduce.” Reporting this, in the Memoir, her nephew adds a charming remark of hers: “Besides, I am too proud of my gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A or Colonel B.”
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 8