Anyway, Jane Austen could use episodes like this one, lightly based on family events or characters, without the slightest fear that the family would take offence. “They were all pleasant in their own family,” said Caroline Austen “... I have thought since, after having seen more of other households, wonderfully, as the family talk had much of spirit and vivacity, and it was never troubled by disagreements as it was not their habit to argue with each other.” And the author of the Memoir came near to apologising for what Americans would call the “closeness” of the Austen family.
There was so much that was agreeable and attractive in this family party that its members may be excused if they were inclined to live somewhat too exclusively within it. They might see in each other much to love and esteem, and something to admire. The family talk had abundance of spirit and vivacity, and was never troubled by disagreements even in little matters, for it was not their habit to dispute or argue with each other: above all, there was strong family affection and firm union, never to be broken but by death.
It is important to remember this background of family solidarity against which Jane Austen wrote. She could count on the audience she most cared about. If they were with her — and clearly they always were —everything else was comparatively unimportant. It would take more than Cadell’s brusque refusal of First Impressions to stop her writing, so long as she had the family for audience. And similarly she could ignore the problem of people who would see themselves as characters (or caricatures) in her books, so long as Henry took no exception to hints of himself in Henry Crawford, or his wife in Mary, and Edward never thought of being John Dashwood. They must, indeed, have been a remarkable family.
But affluence was still confined to Kent. Cassandra and Jane made the best of their straitened circumstances in those days of rising prices. Other people fared worse. In October 1800, Jane reported that Mrs. Martin, who had started the circulating library in 1798, had “totally failed in her business, and had very lately an execution in her house”. Luckily for Mrs. Martin, “Her own brother and Mr. Rider are the principal creditors, and they have seized her effects in order to prevent other people’s doing it.” But it can have been no pleasure to Mrs. Martin, while the failure of the local lending library would hardly have been an encouraging circumstance to a so far unpublished author.
On the surface, the Austens appeared to be managing fairly well in that eighth year of the war with France. They were discussing improvements in the garden, ordering glass from London and tables to be made locally, though it is true that these may have been a present from Edward. “They are both covered with green baize,” said Jane, “and send their best love.” Cassandra had ordered the glasses in London along with other family errands, and Edward had been buying useful presents for the relatives he had just left. James’s wife Mary was “delighted about the mangle ... You will thank Edward for it on their behalf.” And life continued pleasant. There had been a ball at Basingstoke and three different friends had invited Jane to go with them. “With three different methods of going, I must have been more at the ball than anybody else.” But the long war was beginning to take its toll. “There was a scarcity of men in general — a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much ... There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together.” Jane had danced with Catherine Bigg as well as with Stephen Terry, Thomas Chute and James Digweed.
Charles, on H.M.S. Endymion now, was waiting for orders, and Jane was busy making shirts for him, but the end of her letter strikes a couple of notes of warning. Old Mrs. Lloyd was not looking well, and, serious for the Austens, the farm had cleared only three hundred pounds in the last year. Mr. Austen’s conferences with John Bond cannot have been so profitable as Mr. Knightley’s with William Larkins. Another of this series of letters reports one of those bits of raw material that Jane Austen did not think fit to use. A friend of theirs who had already made an unfortunate marriage had now shot himself in the leg. Jane’s sympathy was mainly for his family. “One most material comfort however they have; the assurance of it’s being really an accidental wound ... Such a wound could not have been received in a duel.”
At Steventon, life went on as usual. The Austens were thinking of going to Dawlish next summer, and a storm had blown down several of their and their neighbour’s elm trees, but had done no other damage. “We grieve therefore in some comfort.” The next letter teases Cassandra: “James Digweed... must be in love with you ... from his supposing that the two elms fell from their grief at your absence. Was not it a gallant idea?”
They had heard from Frank, who had distinguished himself in the eastern Mediterranean, and Charles had visited them while waiting for the Endymion to sail “danced the whole evening” at a ball where, says Jane Austen, “I believe I drank too much wine ... I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today.” None of her heroines, after the Juvenilia, ever did this.
A few days later, Jane was writing from Ibthorp, where she was visiting Martha Lloyd and “spending my time very pleasantly”. A Mrs. Stent, who lived with Martha’s mother, was unconsciously sitting for the portrait of Miss Bates. “I have been here ever since a quarter after three on Thursday last, by the Shrewsbury Clock, which I am fortunately enabled absolutely to ascertain, because Mrs. Stent once lived at Shrewsbury, or at least at Tewkesbury.” And again, “Mrs. Stent gives us quite as much of her company as we wish for.” A later reference to the unfortunate Mrs. Stent, in 1805, shows Jane Austen gradually mellowing towards that loving portrait of Miss Bates. “Poor Mrs. Stent! it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody.”
But that was in 1805, when Jane Austen was rising thirty. In November, 1800, Martha and Jane were full of cheerful plans. Martha was to accompany Jane back to Steventon. “Our plan,” said Jane, “is to have a nice black frost for walking to Whitechurch, and there throw ourselves into a postchaise, one upon the other, our heads hanging out at one door, and our feet at the opposite.” They sound just like the heroines of Love and Freindship. In fact, they were actually going to travel by themselves. Jane was just twenty-five and Martha probably older.
Cheerfulness ended when they got to Steventon. In Jane’s absence, Mr. and Mrs. Austen had suddenly decided that the time had come for him to retire. Cassandra was still at Godmersham, so Jane’s visit to Martha had left their parents alone. In the echoing solitude of the old rectory, they had come to their drastic decision. According to family tradition, Mrs. Austen announced the plan without preparation or preamble. “Well, girls, it is all settled. We have decided to leave Steventon ... and go to live at Bath.” Totally unprepared — after all they had recently been buying furniture and discussing improvements to the garden — Jane fainted. She had lived at Steventon all her life.
We do not know the precise grounds for the Austens’ sudden decision. Mrs. Austen may have found the burden of housekeeping too great, with both daughters away, and the rambling empty house to run. And Mr. Austen was rising seventy and may well have been beginning to find the combined management of parish and glebe too much. John Bond was getting on too, and the farm had done badly that year. It is easy to imagine a gloomy conversation over the account books and then the sudden decision to move.
There may have been other reasons. Mrs. Austen’s health seems to have been rather worse than usual, which would help to explain the choice of Bath. The Leigh Perrots, on the other hand, thought the Austens wanted to remove Jane from Steventon because of a growing attachment between her and one of the three Digweed brothers at Steventon Manor, perhaps her “dear Harry” whose deputation she nearly lost, or perhaps William Francis, the entry of whose birth follows hers in the Steventon parish register. Or it may have been the third brother, James, despite his pretty thought about Cassandra and the elms. There may even have been a double flirtation going on, for a later letter of Jane’s teases Cassandra about James Digwe
ed’s visit to Kent while she was at Godmersham. What is hard to understand is why the Austens would not have approved of such a match. Two of the Digweeds married quite soon afterwards, James in 1803 and Harry in 1808, but William Francis seems to have remained single, so anyone who likes can imagine him as wearing the willow for Jane.
Another possibility is that young Harris Bigg Wither, six years her junior, was showing too much interest in Jane, but I think it altogether more likely that no one was showing enough. Cassandra was almost twenty-eight, and Jane just twenty-five, and they must have made a fairly formidable combination. There may have been method in the way the family split them up by separate visits to Edward, but still it would not do. If Jane dismissed the young men she met at balls as not “good for much”, what did they think of Jane? And if there was a dangerous hint of laughter about her when she went to balls alone, what in the world can she and Cassandra have been like together? Even the best of good manners cannot quite hide the delicious complicity of a shared joke.
The Austens had tried James’s dinner parties, had meditated visits to Brighton or to Dawlish, now they were to try the more desperate expedient of a move to Bath, no doubt on the principle Jane Austen herself enunciated in Northanger Abbey, that “if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” If Jane recognised this unacknowledged matrimonial consideration as a reason for the move, it would go far to explain her distress. She may have written about the husband hunt, but she never approved of it. Besides, she was already on record as disliking Bath, and all her roots were in Steventon.
It must have been a bad time for her, and, inevitably, her letter to Cassandra announcing the proposed move has been destroyed. But she believed in fortitude. The first surviving letter is dated January 3rd, 1801, less than a month after the bad news had broken. It shows her determined to be cheerful, though straining at it a little. “We plan having a steady cook, and a young giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter — No children of course to be allowed on either side.” They were hard at it discussing different districts of Bath, and plans in general for the move, which was to be followed by a visit to the sea somewhere in the west country. Jane’s heart was set on going with Cassandra to stay with the Leigh Perrots and look for a house. “Your going I consider as indispensably necessary, and I shall not like being left behind; there is no place here or hereabouts that I shall want to be staying at ...” This seems to dispose at once of the James Austens and the Biggs at Manydown. Jane Austen was apparently not prepared for the kind of compromise by which her own Anne Elliot left her beloved Kellynch Hall not for Bath at once but for a visit to her sister at Uppercross. But then, Anne Elliot and her kind of fortitude were far in the future. In the present, Jane Austen was doing her best to seem resigned, but her real feelings would break through. “I get more and more reconciled to our removal ... For a time we shall now possess many of the advantages which I have often thought of with envy in the wives of sailors or soldiers.” It takes a moment to recognise the stinging irony of this.
The arrangements went on. James was to take over the living at Steventon as his father’s locum tenens, and the Austens hoped to have six hundred pounds a year to live on in Bath. The curacy of Deane was now to be disposed of, and Mr. Austen was thinking of offering it to James Digweed, but, said Jane, “Unless he is in love with Miss Lyford, I think he had better not be settled exactly in this neighbourhood, and unless he is very much in love with her indeed, he is not likely to think a salary of £50 equal in value or efficacy to one of £75.”
Jane Austen did not seem to take her own suggestion about James Digweed and Miss Lyford very seriously, for she went on to say that he might reconsider the living at Deane if Cassandra was “to be considered as one of the fixtures of the house!” But in fact James Digweed did refuse the curacy, and did marry Mary Susannah Lyford in 1803. As for James Austen, his sister’s tone about him and his wife becomes increasingly dry as this series of letters continues. The process of handing over does not seem to have gone smoothly, except, perhaps, for James and Mary. “The brown mare, which as well as the black was to devolve on James at our removal, has not had patience to wait for that, and has settled herself even now at Deane ... everything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner.” It does sound a little as if Mrs. Norris was at work.
James, apparently did not need or did not want the glebe, which was to be let to a neighbour, Mr. Holder, who was prepared to take John Bond with it. Jane was disappointed, as Harry Digweed had intended to offer him the position of superintendent at Steventon Manor. It was now that James Digweed was in Kent, near Cassandra. “Why did not J.D. make his proposals to you? I suppose he went to see the Cathedral, that he might know how he should like to be married in it.” This is probably Austen-nonsense, like a remark about their old friend and patroness, Mrs. Knight. “I am happy to hear of Mrs. Knight’s amendment, whatever might be her complaint. I cannot think so ill of her however in spite of your insinuations, as to suspect her of having lain-in — I do not think she would be betrayed beyond an accident at the utmost.” Cassandra obviously wrote Austen-nonsense too. Unfortunately none of her letters to Jane survives, and only a few others, notably the moving ones she wrote to their niece Fanny after her sister’s death. But exchanges like this one about Mrs. Knight serve as a useful reminder of how close and private the correspondence between the sisters was. No doubt they made a point of putting in passages suitable for reading aloud, as Jane urged her niece Fanny to do, later, when Fanny was writing to her about her own love affairs. We know that Jane did not show Fanny’s letters even to Cassandra, and it is therefore safe to assume that the sisters’ letters were shown to no one. Jane Austen did not write, like Pope or Byron, with one eye half-fixed on posterity, and critics who forget this are in danger of looking very silly. She could write nonsense about Mrs. Knight’s imaginary pregnancy or Mrs. Hall’s dead baby because she was writing to Cassandra, who would understand. Nobody else, in this context, matters.
Letters were all very well, but, with this family crisis at the boil, Jane Austen actually admitted to missing Cassandra, though in characteristic style. “Neither my affection for you nor for letter-writing can stand out against a Kentish visit. For a three months’ absence I can be a very loving relation and a very excellent correspondent, but beyond that I degenerate into negligence and indifference.” Luckily, Cassandra was already planning her return home by way of a visit to Henry and Eliza, now settled in Upper Berkeley Street. A mention of Charles and Frank serves as a reminder of how long it took to communicate with the Navy. They had both been in the Mediterranean, and Charles, writing from Lisbon on his way home, did not know whether Frank had yet had news of the promotion to Post Captain that he had received the year before. Both brothers were shortly expected in England and would be able to pay visits to Steventon, “while Steventon is ours”. Meanwhile, the Austens were busy with farewell visits. They had been to see some Dysons. “The house seemed to have all the comforts of little children, dirt and litter. Mr. Dyson as usual looked wild, and Mrs. Dyson as usual looked big.” Jane Austen felt more and more strongly, as she grew older, about the drain of constant child-bearing on her married friends. Probably, without being aware of it, she was becoming less and less marriageable herself. Might she even, at this point, have agreed with her Cousin Eliza’s views on “dear liberty”? Probably not, since her liberty, such as it was, merely tied her to her parents, and, through them, to Bath.
As so often, she was to be disappointed in that wish of hers about visiting Bath with Cassandra. In vain was her plan of “disordering my stomach with Bath buns”, so as to be less of an expense to her rich and frugal Aunt Leigh Perrot. All their plans changed in the course of the winter, and in the end Jane and her mother went to Bath alone, to visit the Leigh Perrots in Paragon Buildings, while Cassandra stayed with Martha Lloyd a
t Ibthorp and Mr. Austen visited relatives in Kent and London.
Inevitably, the letters from Bath are full of houses with rising damp, or tiny rooms, or both. It took some time for the Austens to find what they wanted, but in the meantime the Leigh Perrots were being very kind, and Mrs. Austen’s health had improved. Jane, on the other hand, was sleeping badly, and so was Cassandra. “I hope you improve in sleeping — I think you must, because I fall off.” Although it was just the end of the season at Bath, and they were only in time for the last two, ill-attended balls, there were plenty of people to be observed. Life in Bath stopped Jane writing, but it provided her lavishly with material for the future. After her first ball she was able to report that, “I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an adulteress.” She had no doubt met Mrs. Rushworth for the first time. There were other characters to be observed. “Mrs. Badcock and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs. Badcock thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene.” It would not have amused Fanny Price, still less Jane Austen’s Victorian kinsmen. Quoting this letter, Lord Brabourne quietly cuts the word adulteress, though he leaves in the intoxicated Badcocks.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 9