This letter also has a couple of interesting sidelights on the Austen family life. A friend of theirs had shown Mrs. Austen a letter Cassandra had written her, and Jane Austen comments, in parenthesis, “which by the bye in your place I should not like”. It is another reminder that letters, for Jane and Cassandra, were a private affair. In this one, Jane mentions visiting a Miss Armstrong. “Like other young ladies she is considerably genteeler than her parents. Mrs. Armstrong sat darning a pair of stockings the whole of my visit. But I do not mention this at home, lest a warning should act as an example.” One cannot help feeling a little sorry for Mrs. Austen, and remembering the old days at Steventon when she used to do the mending in the family parlour because there was so much of it to do.
They were enjoying Lyme. Jane Austen bathed and found it so delightful that she stayed in rather too long. She also walked on the Cobb, no doubt storing up impressions, consciously or otherwise, for one of the most famous scenes in her books. It is pleasant to think that the unusually romantic description of Lyme in Persuasion reflected a halcyon period in her own life. “A very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better.” When she speaks of “green chasms between romantic rocks”, it is possible, for once, to think of her as the contemporary of Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Mrs. Lloyd recovered, and presumably all four Austens were back in Bath when they received the news that Jane’s dear friend Mrs. Lefroy had been killed by a fall from her horse. It happened on December 16th, Jane’s birthday, and four years later Jane commemorated the disaster in stiff, heartrending verses:
But come, fond Fancy, thou indulgent power;
Hope is desponding, chill, severe, to thee:
Bless thou this little portion of an hour;
Let me behold her as she used to be.
Three years younger than Coleridge, and five than Wordsworth, she was still writing the verse of the eighteenth century.
But the stiff lines are eloquent of real grief. She had lost a very dear friend. Next month, she lost her father. Mr. Austen died after an illness of only forty-eight hours on January 21st, 1805. Two letters from Jane Austen breaking the news to Frank have survived. She had to write twice, because the first letter was sent to an out-of-date address. Both letters are models of their kind. She thought of everything that Frank would need to know, and gave him all the comfort she could. The illness had been short; their father had suffered as little as possible; their mother was bearing up. Oddly, there is no mention of Cassandra in either letter. She was probably away.
They had moved by now to a house in Green Park Buildings, and Jane told Frank that though James had pressed them to come back to Steventon with him, she thought they would stay there for the three months for which the house was rented. But of course they were faced with the immemorial problem of widows and orphans. Mr. Austen’s income from Steventon Rectory died with him. The living devolved on James, and Mrs. Austen and her two daughters were left with a combined income of two hundred and ten pounds. Mr. Austen had started his children well in life, but he had not been able to save for them. In fact, even the annual two hundred and ten pounds was partly Cassandra’s, the interest on the thousand pounds left her by Tom Fowle.
Though they say everything that should be said, there is something a little stiff about Jane Austen’s letters on her father’s death. It lends substance to the comment of some critics that her books never show happy, established marriages, or functioning parents. There is certainly some truth in this rather general accusation. So far as really satisfactory marriages are concerned, only the Crofts and the Harvilles leap to the mind, and they are both, significantly, naval, and in Persuasion, the last and mellowest of Jane Austen’s completed books. When she wanted to describe a satisfactory marriage, Jane Austen seems instinctively to have turned to those of her sailor brothers. But there is absolutely nothing to suggest that Mr. and Mrs. Austen senior were not a happy couple. It seems more likely that they were, if anything, too contented with each other. What had probably, and painfully, happened to Jane was that she had recognised the fact that she had outgrown them. She could take Cassandra with her, but when their mother read Pride and Prejudice aloud, she spoiled it. We do not know at what point in her life Jane looked at the “handsome proctor” with his fine head of white hair, and found him wanting, but she probably did so. As for their mother, a tone of affectionate impatience had crept into the letters quite early on, but then daughters do outgrow their mothers.
And, in fact, functioning parents are the last thing one wants in the kind of gay, romantic novel that Jane Austen’s books appear to be. If Mrs. Woodhouse had survived, Emma would have been less spoiled, and if sensible Mrs. Morland had taken her daughter to Bath, she would have seen to it that none of those delicious adventures happened. But it remains significant that when Catherine returns home with a broken heart, her mother fails to recognise the condition. Jane Austen does seem to have thought of parents as makers of mistakes. Mr. Bennet lets Lydia go to Brighton against Elizabeth’s advice; Sir Thomas Bertram leaves his daughters’ moral training to their intolerable aunt. Only Mrs. Dashwood, learning by experience, “could be calm, could be even prudent, when the life of a child was at stake”. And even here Jane Austen is making the point that if Mrs. Dashwood had been a little calmer and more prudent earlier on, she would have saved her children a great deal of trouble.
The problems of education, and of heredity, fascinated Jane Austen. She liked to trace things back to their roots, and was careful to provide Wickham with a spendthrift mother to explain his character, and to distinguish between the different kinds of education that made such different characters of the Ferrars brothers. She said that in Mansfield Park she was taking a new theme, ordination, but education would describe her subject as well, or better. The moral of that story seems to be that there is nothing like a little good honest neglect for rearing children of character.
But Mansfield Park was far in the future. In the present, the problem was how the Austen ladies were to live. Luckily for them, they were not Dashwoods. A touching correspondence between the brothers (preserved in Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers by J. H. and E. C. Hubback) shows them all eager to do something for their bereaved womenfolk. In the end Edward gave his mother a hundred pounds a year. Frank wanted to do the same, but Mrs. Austen would only accept fifty from him. James gave the same amount, and Henry undertook to do so too, “so long as my present precarious income remains”. Charles was still a mere commander of a sloop and was shortly to leave for seven years on the American station, during which he married and started a family, so that there was no chance of his being able to help for some considerable time. Henry, as usual, was optimistic. “I really think that my mother and sisters will be to the full as rich as ever.” In fact, Jane Austen had earlier written that her father hoped to retire on an income of six hundred pounds. It takes the eye of hope indeed to look on the precariously subscribed four hundred and sixty pounds as equal to this. Edward and Frank undoubtedly paid up regularly, but it is difficult to be so sure about Henry. Significantly, there is no record of any offer of help from Mrs. Austen’s rich brother, James Leigh Perrot, but years later, after Jane Austen’s death and James Leigh Perrot’s, his widow did help her sister-in-law.
At least, like her daughter, Mrs. Austen was a realist. She could not have reared eight children on a limited income otherwise. By April, the three of them had moved into furnished lodgings at 25, Gay Street in Bath with only one maid. Mrs. Lloyd was ill again, and Cassandra went to help nurse her. Her reports were not encouraging. “Poor woman!” wrote Jane in reply. “May her end be peaceful and easy as the exit we have witnessed ... even the consciousness of existence I suppose was gone when you wrote.” Jane Austen was learning about death. But the living were more important, and she wrote letters intended to amuse her sister. “The nonsense I have been writing in this and in my last letter, seems out of place at such a tim
e; but I will not mind it, it will do you no harm, and nobody else will be attacked by it.” Her niece Fanny was to do the same for her when she was dying.
Cassandra’s next letter must have announced Mrs. Lloyd’s death, and Jane’s answer to it has been destroyed. The following one thanks Cassandra for a second letter with a “very comfortable” account of their bereaved friend Martha. She was alone now, since both her sisters were married, and it was already settled that she should throw in her lot with the three Austen ladies. “I am quite of your opinion as to the folly of concealing any longer our intended partnership with Martha, and whenever there has of late been an enquiry on the subject I have always been sincere.” It was an arrangement that was to work out admirably for all of them. From then on, to all intents and purposes, Mrs. Austen had three daughters to share any burden that might have to be borne.
Meanwhile Mr. Austen had been dead three months and Jane and her mother were visiting again. “What request we are in! ... I think we are just the kind of people and party to be treated about among our relations.” Like Emma Woodhouse, Jane was arranging quiet evening parties for her solitary parent. She had a slight battle with herself about inviting the Leigh Perrots to one of them, but in the end decided that, “It was of the first consequence to avoid anything that might seem a slight to them.” The Leigh Perrots were evidently difficult people to deal with, both socially and financially. “My aunt is in a great hurry to pay me for my cap, but cannot find in her heart to give me good money.” It must have been trying as between a niece so poor and an aunt so rich.
There were cousins visiting Bath, on both sides of the family, and Jane spoke highly of one of them, George Cooke, a Leigh connection who “was very kind and talked sense to me every now and then in the intervals of his more animated fooleries with Miss Bendish”. But, “there was a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing, and common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit — all that bordered on it, or on sense came from my Cousin George, who altogether I like very well.” George, son of Jane’s godfather, was twenty-five at the time, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi. At twenty-nine, and in mourning twice over, Jane no doubt seemed a great deal older, and it is pleasant to think of her cousin recognising her quality and taking the trouble to talk sense to her.
A great advantage of having Martha settled with them was that now Cassandra and Jane could go to Kent together. The next surviving letter was written that August from Godmersham, where Jane was staying with Edward and Elizabeth, to Goodnestone, also in Kent, where Cassandra was staying with Elizabeth’s widowed mother, Lady Bridges. Cassandra, who seems to have been the family nurse, had gone back to Goodnestone with Harriot Bridges, who had a cold. Jane was already demonstrating her virtues as an aunt, playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with her nephew William, and going for walks with “George and Henry to animate us by their races and merriment”. She had heard from Frank, who “is in a great hurry to be married”, and had “encouraged him in it”. She had also found Cassandra’s white mittens, which “were folded up within my clean nightcap, and send their duty to you”. Elizabeth’s hairdresser had charged Jane only two and six for cutting her hair: “He certainly respects either our youth or our poverty.” A postscript enlarged on the theme. “I find on looking into my affairs, that instead of being very rich I am likely to be very poor, I cannot afford more than ten shillings for Sackree.” Sackree was Elizabeth’s maid. Tipping must always have been a problem to the Austen girls when they visited in Kent.
The next letter shows that Jane and Cassandra had changed places. Jane was at Goodnestone keeping Harriot Bridges company and Cassandra back at Godmersham. There were plans afoot for a joint excursion to Worthing, but Cassandra and Jane’s part in it seemed uncertain. “We shall not be at Worthing so soon as we have been used to talk of, shall we? This will be no evil to us, and we are sure of my mother and Martha being happy together.” No doubt Cassandra and Jane’s visit to Kent was the usual three months or so, and the proposed meeting at Worthing would make their return to Bath easier.
Judging by the watermark on two of its pages, Lady Susan was fair-copied during 1805, but this is the only evidence there is of literary activity on Jane’s part. She may still have been working on The Watsons, or she may have taken up the fair-copying of Lady Susan as a distraction after abandoning it. Obviously, this was a year of change and upheaval, with no time for much serious work. Settling down as a household of four women, instead of three women and a man, must inevitably have presented its problems, though, judging by the reference to Martha quoted above, these cannot have been too serious. Martha and Cassandra were in their thirties now, and Jane would be thirty in December. James’s daughter, Caroline Austen was born this year. Many years later, she wrote a brief Memoir of her famous aunt. One remark of hers probably applies to about this time. “I believe my two aunts were not accounted very good dressers, and were thought to have taken to the garb of middle age unnecessarily soon — but they were particularly neat, and they held all untidy ways in great disesteem.” We do not know how the family income of four hundred and sixty pounds was shared out, or whether Cassandra and Jane were still on twenty-pound allowances, but they probably had good reason for economy in dress.
There are no letters for 1806, but it was an eventful year. Frank came back from a cruise to the West Indies covered in glory, was thanked by Parliament and married his Mary Gibson. He had probably already arranged with his mother that the two families should join forces that autumn in Southampton, a remarkably brave act on everybody’s part, but one doubtless dictated by economic necessity. At least it freed the Austen ladies from Bath, which they left for good on July 2nd. One of Mrs. Austen’s few surviving letters, written in April, gives a good idea of the life they were to leave. They had had James’s daughter Anna staying with them, and, “I may well call this a gay week.” There had been a ball, a concert where the famous Mrs. Billington sang, and a visit to the theatre.
But not even George Frederick Cooke as Macbeth could reconcile Jane Austen to life in Bath. Writing to Cassandra two years later, she spoke of their feelings of relief at getting away at last. “It will be two years tomorrow since we left Bath for Clifton, with what happy feelings of escape!” They had gone first to Clifton and then to stay with Mrs. Austen’s cousin the Reverend Thomas Leigh, at his rectory of Adlestrop. The Leigh family was in a state of considerable upheaval at the time, since the Honourable Mary Leigh, life-heir to the Stoneleigh estates, had died on July 2nd. She had held the property under a rather curious will which left the succession in some doubt as between Thomas Leigh, his cousin James Leigh Perrot, and Thomas’s nephew, the logical heir, James Henry Leigh.
Thomas had rather jumped the gun by moving straight into Stoneleigh Abbey on receiving the news of Mary Leigh’s death in London, and some slightly acrimonious negotiations between the three possible heirs followed. But by August the heirs got together and began to work on what Jane Austen was to call, years later, “that vile compromise”. Thomas Leigh, who was childless, was to succeed, with reversion to James Henry Leigh, while James Leigh Perrot waived his claim in consideration of a large sum of money and an annuity for himself and his wife. All this took some working out, and the “vile compromise” was not signed until November 1808. In the meanwhile, Thomas Leigh was master of Stoneleigh Abbey and took his cousins there with him when he moved in on August 5th. A surviving letter from Mrs. Austen senior reports: “The house is larger than I could have supposed ... I have proposed his [her cousin’s] setting up directing posts at the angles.” There were five and a half acres of garden, views of the Avon and a state bedchamber, with a high dark crimson velvet bed: “an alarming apartment just fit for a heroine”. Had she been rereading Northanger Abbey? It is a letter that makes one feel more kindly towards Jane Austen’s mother, particularly when she goes on to describe a fellow guest. “Poor Lady Saye and Sele[7] to be sure is rather tormenting, though sometimes amusing, and affords Jane many a good laugh.”
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p; One needs to remember this episode when considering a detestable letter that Jane Austen’s favourite niece Fanny was to write, years later, to her younger sister. Fanny was Lady Knatchbull then, and very much aware of the importance of her position, and she felt she must apologise for her aunts. Her letter makes painful reading.
Yes my love it is very true that Aunt Jane from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been for her talent, and if she had lived 50 years later she would have been in many respects more suitable to our more refined tastes. They were not rich, and the people with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred ... and they of course though superior in mental powers and cultivation were on the same level so far as refinement goes — but I think in later life their intercourse with Mrs. Knight (who was very fond of and kind to them) improved them both and Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of “common-ness” ... Both the aunts were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the world and its ways (I mean as to fashions &c) and if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent, and the kindness of Mrs. Knight, who used often to have one or the other of the sisters staying with her, they would have been, though not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society and its ways.
So Lady Knatchbull. It is odd to think that among the letters that she did not make available to her nephew for his Memoir was one from Jane Austen dated September 1813, with a comment on two of Mrs. Knight’s Knatchbull connections, for Fanny finally married a cousin. “They are very goodnatured you know and civil and all that — but are not particularly superfine.” One must always remember the gap that existed between Kent and Hampshire. The Kent family probably knew little or nothing about the Leigh connection. Lady Knatchbull would have been amazed at the idea of her Aunt Jane getting “many a good laugh” out of “poor Lady Saye and Sele”.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 11