There was a continuing source of irritation in the news from Steventon, where the valuation and sale of the family’s effects was continuing. Because of the expense and risk of moving furniture, everything the family possessed, except, oddly enough, their beds, was being sold, a good deal of it, at a valuation, to James. Jane had wanted James to take their father’s five hundred books “at a venture at half a guinea a volume”, but shrewd James waited for the valuation and got the lot for seventy pounds. “The whole world is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expense of another,” said Jane. The tables that had been brand new, and sent their love to Cassandra, in November, had fetched only eleven guineas, and one must hope that it was not Mary Austen who got Jane’s piano for eight. Jane, too, had sold her books. “Ten shillings for Dodsley’s Poems however please me to the quick and I do not care how often I sell them for as much.” We can only imagine what she really felt on parting with the books she had collected since childhood. The news of the move had been something to faint about.
Meanwhile, in Bath, she threw herself with a slightly unconvincing gusto into the elderly but extensive social life of her aunt and uncle, describing parties, “not quite so stupid as the two preceding ones”, calls, people, and, of course, clothes. She actually went out driving by herself with a married Mr. Evelyn in “a very bewitching phaeton and four”, and made friends despite herself with a Mrs. Chamberlayne — “We shake hands whenever we meet.” They had gone for a walk together, too, which receives a would-be comic description. It is not often that Jane Austen fails in this line, and the failure is undoubtedly indicative of her real state of mind at this time. She did her best to sound cheerful for Cassandra’s benefit, but her best was not quite good enough, except when she had something really heart-warming to describe, like their brother Charles’s return home. “He has received £30 for his share of the privateer and expects more — but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents to his sisters. He has been buying gold chains and topaze crosses for us; he must be well scolded.” The gift was probably as timely in Jane Austen’s life as a similar one was to be in Fanny Price’s, and fraught with fewer complications.
7
No letters of Jane Austen’s survive for the period between May 1801 and September 1804, which probably means that a great deal happened to her, not much of it good. We have Eliza Austen’s authority for the fact that the family spent the summer of 1801 in Devon. In the autumn they were back in Bath, settled at last in Number 4, Sidney Gardens, one of the possible positions Jane had rather ironically described to Cassandra. “It would be very pleasant to be near Sidney Gardens! — We might go into the labyrinth every day.” Sidney Gardens was a kind of Bath Vauxhall, providing firework displays and other such delights. The Austens’ house faced the gardens, so they doubtless got the full benefit of these displays, but on the other hand it had the signal virtue, from the point of view of an active walker like Jane Austen, of being on the outskirts of the town. If she could find a Mrs. Chamberlayne, or, better still, Cassandra for company, she could indulge herself freely in the activity she and Elizabeth Bennet both enjoyed.
The Austens spent their summers at the seaside during this period, and it was probably on one of these visits that Jane Austen met the young man Cassandra was to describe, years later, to their niece Caroline. He was,
A gentleman whom they had met one summer when they were by the sea — I think she said in Devonshire; I don’t think she named the place, and I am sure she did not say Lyme, for that I should have remembered — that he seemed greatly attracted by my Aunt Jane — I suppose it was an intercourse of some weeks — and that when they had to part ... he was urgent to know where they would be the next summer, implying or perhaps saying that he should be there also, wherever it might be. I can only say that the impression left on Aunt Cassandra was that he had fallen in love with her sister, and was quite in earnest. Soon afterwards they heard of his death ... I am sure she thought he was worthy of her sister, from the way in which she recalled his memory, and also that she did not doubt, either, that he would have been a successful suitor.
There are conflicting versions of this story. Caroline’s older half-sister, Anna Lefroy, assigned it to 1798 or 1799 when, according to her, Jane Austen visited Devonshire with her parents and met a Mr. Blackall, a clergyman, who promised to come to Steventon, but died before he could do so. There is obviously some confusion here with Mrs. Lefroy senior’s friend Mr. Blackall. Since Mrs. Lefroy senior died in 1804 and Anna did not marry her son until 1814 there was plenty of time for such confusion to arise. It seems likely that Anna simply mixed up two stories she had heard about her aunt’s past, and Caroline’s dating certainly seems the more probable.
Yet another variant of the story sets the scene of the unlucky romance in Switzerland, suggesting that the Austens went there in 1802 when the brief peace with France made European travel possible. In this version, the young man was a naval officer who met them at Chamonix and left them briefly with the intention of rejoining them, instead of which they received news of his sudden death. This story is wildly unlikely. The Austens’ diminished income would hardly have allowed of trips to Switzerland, even if Mrs. Austen’s health had, and anyway they were in Dawlish in the summer of 1802.
In whatever form, it is a sad little story, and an odd one in that it parallels Cassandra’s own experience so closely. Is it possible that the charming young man had, in fact, behaved like Tom Lefroy and Mr. Blackall and who knows how many others before him, become frightened of those quietly intelligent sisters, and simply disappeared? And that, remembering the episode many years later, Cassandra supplied her beloved sister with her own more tragic and, from a contemporary point of view, more respectable ending to the affair?
This, of course, is pure conjecture. What is certain is that we must, selfishly, be grateful to the young man for dying, or disappearing, whichever he did. If Jane Austen had settled down, either in 1799 or in the early 1800s to marriage and the inevitable string of babies, her first three novels would probably have been lost, and her last three would certainly never have been written. But if, as Cassandra suggested, she really loved the young man, it must have been a bleak time for Jane Austen, however she lost him. With her first three books still unpublished, the fact that she was laying down experience for the creation of Anne Elliot would have been small consolation. When the letters begin again, there are several references to the plight of the impoverished old maid or widow. There is “poor Mrs. Stent! ... always in the way”, and, of another widow of their acquaintance, “at her age, perhaps, one may be as friendless oneself, and in similar circumstances quite as captious”. Jane Austen believed in facing facts, and, the fact was that the impoverished spinsters of her day were in even worse case than widows, lacking the status that marriage conferred.
It was doubtless because she had such a clear eye for the bleak realities of her situation, and Cassandra’s, that Jane Austen involved herself in a surprising episode in the winter of 1802. She and Cassandra had gone back to Steventon to stay with James and Mary, and gone on from there to visit the Biggs at Manydown. The Biggs are not, in fact, mentioned by name in Caroline Austen’s story of this episode, but they are the only people who fit the facts as recounted. At all events, the two sisters returned to Steventon, in their hosts’ carriage, much sooner than they were expected, and James and Mary, watching, presumably, from a window, saw them say a hurried farewell, with many tears, to their hostesses, before they came into the house and insisted that they must go back to Bath at once. It was not at all convenient for James to accompany them, as it involved both Sunday travelling and missing his own Sunday duty, but for once Jane and Cassandra were firm. James yielded, and took them home, learning, in due course, that Jane had actually accepted an offer of marriage from Harris Bigg Wither the night before, thought again, and refused him in the morning. It was a drastic action for a young woman of her day, but probably an extremely sen
sible one. Jane Austen was twenty-seven and Harris twenty-two at the time. He married two years later. For her, it was probably the last flicker of romance. In her books, twenty-seven is the climacteric year, the one when Anne Elliot recovers her bloom and her lost lover, and Charlotte Lucas catches Mr. Collins. As for Jane herself; from now on, as Mrs. Austen perceptively said, she and Cassandra “were wedded to each other”. It was a happy marriage, and a productive one. “I have got my own darling child from London,” said Jane Austen in 1813, on receiving her first copy of Pride and Prejudice.
By now it will be evident that critics of Jane Austen who claim that she had little or no experience in matters of the heart have simply not studied her life. The only thing that probably never happened to her was a totally satisfactory proposal, and this, it is true, is something at which she tends to boggle, fobbing the reader off with summary and hearsay. But whether this is from lack of experience, or from her own intense feeling of the privacy of such an episode, it would be hard to say. Her hand with the early stages of courtship is masterly. Darcy falling insensibly in love with Elizabeth while she goes right on disliking him, and rather fancies herself in love with Wickham, is as good as Elizabeth’s gradual slide into love for Darcy, and the delicate comedy of it is summed up in Elizabeth’s final comment to her beloved sister Jane, who has asked when, in fact, she began to love Darcy. “It has been coming on so gradually,” replies Elizabeth, “that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Perhaps the most delightful thing about this characteristic Jane Austen remark is that critics as eminent as Sir Walter Scott have taken Elizabeth Bennet at her word and dismissed her as a fortune-hunter.
Jane Austen had watched two brothers marry once, and another one twice. She must have studied the development of Cassandra’s engagement to Tom Fowle with an almost painful intensity. There was not much she did not know about the ways of men with women, and vice versa. She had also been almost too close to several marriages, and was to be closer still. She had plenty of chance to study the effect of Mary on her brother James, and the happier situation of Edward and his Elizabeth. When she refused Harris Bigg Wither after what must have been a sleepless night, she knew exactly what she was doing. She was condemning herself to a lifetime as a second-class citizen, an object of contemptuous humour, an old maid. She was also condemning herself to write Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, and we must be grateful to her, and to Cassandra, who undoubtedly made it possible. If there had been no Cassandra, I imagine there would have been no sleepless night, and a large family of extremely intelligent little Bigg Withers.
As it was, characteristically, Jane Austen must have taken a deep breath, called up her considerable reserves of fortitude and gone on playing the part of the daughter at home in Bath. A painful distraction was her mother’s serious illness which took place at some time during these silent years. Mrs. Austen came near to death, recovered, and celebrated the event in a set of very passable comic verses, in which she gives the credit equally to her doctor, her husband’s prayers, and her daughters’ devoted nursing.
Another anxiety at this time was the visit Henry and Eliza Austen paid to France in the hopes of recovering the de Feuillide estates. Henry had left the army by 1801, and he and Eliza were living, according to Eliza’s cousin, Philadelphia Walter, “quite in style in Upper Berkeley Street”. Eliza’s backward child, little Hastings, died that year, which must, one would think, have considerably weakened any claim on the de Feuillide estates. But according to family tradition, Henry and Eliza went to France after the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and stayed on until war broke out again in 1803, when Napoleon took the unprecedented step of ordering the internment of all British subjects then in France. Many unfortunates who had hurried back to the gaieties of Paris found themselves incarcerated for the very considerable duration of the war. Quick-witted Eliza got the two of them safely home by taking entire charge of their journey. Her French was so good that they got to the coast unsuspected, but they had had no success about the estates.
The Peace of Amiens had affected the sailor brothers too. Francis Austen had been put on half pay, and was probably relieved when war broke out again, as all thinking people were sure it would, in 1803. He went back to work at once, raising a corps of sea fencibles (a sort of sea version of the more recent British Home Guard) to defend the shores of Kent from the invasion threatened by Napoleon. His headquarters were at Ramsgate, and Jane must have visited him during this period, since Sir Egerton Brydges mentions meeting her there. Frank got engaged about this time, and returned to Ramsgate in 1806 to marry there, but by then he was back at sea, and had just missed Trafalgar. His match with Mary Gibson ended a fond hope of Cassandra’s and Jane’s that he would marry their friend Martha Lloyd, who had suffered a “disappointment” as so many young women did and do. In fact, Frank’s wife Mary was to be a favourite sister-in-law and, many years later, after her death, he actually did marry Martha Lloyd. But by then Jane was dead too.
In 1803 she may have been visibly unhappy. Perhaps in an attempt to cheer her up, her father made a second and, on the face of it, more successful attempt to get one of her books published. This time it was Susan (our Northanger Abbey), which was sold outright to Messrs. Crosby & Cox for the vast sum of ten pounds. It probably did seem vast to Jane Austen compared with her allowance of twenty pounds a year. Since there are no letters for this period we do not know what she did with the money, but must hope that it was something satisfactory, for having bought the book and advertised it once, Crosby apparently lost heart and did no more about it. It must have been an exacerbating experience for its author, and it would probably have been little comfort to her to know that modern critics would argue that it was possibly the very quality of the book that caused its suppression. The Gothic romances it satirised were still best-sellers, and Crosby may have decided not to foul his own nest by publishing this splendid mockery of them.
But the slow, bitter disappointment of his failure to publish Susan was in the future. For the moment, the sale may have helped to start Jane Austen writing again. Change of scene is always a problem for an author, and, for her, moving from Steventon to Bath was probably as drastic as for a modern author to cross the Atlantic. At all events, she seems to have written nothing for the first few years at Bath. The next thing she started, the untitled fragment that is known as The Watsons, is on paper watermarked 1803, and we have the authority of a great-niece that it was begun in 1804. Jane Austen was writing again, but she was not writing happily. The Watsons is her most cold-blooded and least humorous attempt at studying the realities of the husband hunt. Its heroine, Emma Watson, is one of a large, impecunious family and has had the apparent luck of being adopted by a wealthy, widowed aunt. But the adoption has been informal and before the story opens the rich widow has married again — this time an Irish adventurer. The story begins with Emma back at home, penniless like her sisters, but with higher standards, to make what she can of her life. And what can she make but a good marriage?
Through her lips, Jane Austen makes perhaps her clearest statement about the husband hunt. “To be so bent on marriage — to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation — is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest — I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.” In 1804, those were strong words. The fragment of The Watsons shows opportunity opening before Emma. The local aristocrat, Lord Osborne, takes a fancy to her and so, inevitably, does his admirably drawn toad-eater, Tom Musgrave, but we have the authority of the Austen family for the fact that in the end she married neither of them, choosing instead the respectable clergyman whose little nephew she had befriended. A husband may not have been Jane Austen’s recipe for herself, but she always provided them for her heroines.
The author of the Memo
ir, a worthy son to James and Mary Austen, thought his aunt had abandoned The Watsons because she found she had set her scene in too low a class of society. This is, quite obviously, absurd, and would have amused Jane Austen very much. She enjoyed dealing with the fringe situations between aristocracy and middle class, and was superbly equipped to do so. The misunderstandings, affronts and absurdities involved were meat and drink to her, as they would be to Henry James, and, in rather different terms, to many modern novelists. The scene where the foppish young aristocrats come to call just as the Watsons’ vulgar servants are producing the knife-box for their unfashionably early dinner is masterly of its kind.
But on the whole there is something slightly flat about The Watsons, which may simply mean that it lacks the hard revision and final polish that Jane Austen liked to give to her books, but may well indicate her own state of mind when she wrote it. At all events she was doomed to be interrupted. The first break was a pleasant one, their summer visit to the sea, which took them, in 1804, to Lyme Regis. The Henry Austens went too, and then took Cassandra on to Weymouth with them, leaving Jane and her parents at Lyme, but soon afterwards an urgent summons sent Cassandra hurrying to Ibthorp, where Martha Lloyd’s mother was dangerously ill. One letter from Jane to Cassandra survives. “I endeavour as far as I can to supply your place and be useful, and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water-decanter as fast as I can and give the cook physic which she throws off her stomach.” She is thinking about words again. Their servant “has a great many more than all the cardinal virtues (for the cardinal virtues in themselves have been so often possessed that they are no longer worth having).” If there was one thing Jane Austen detested, it was an overworked phrase.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 10