It is a remark of Mrs. Austen’s for which we cannot be sufficiently grateful. After her daughter had died, and become famous, a terrible amount of nonsense was talked about how she never said an unkind thing, or laughed at the follies of others. It is, quite simply, impossible to believe, and, luckily, we have her own mother’s authority to the contrary. Jane Austen would undoubtedly have confessed, like her own Elizabeth Bennet, “Follies and nonsense, whims, and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” Laughter was the sunshine that made Jane Austen’s life bearable.
8
Jane Austen was well acquainted with the mechanics of the country house life of her day. Stoneleigh Abbey was merely one of the larger houses that she visited, and she could undoubtedly have written volumes, had she so wished, about the subtle distinctions between different styles and levels of living. She could easily have expatiated on the complexities of the servants’ hall, and talked knowledgeably about butlers, and footmen, and grooms of the chambers. But these were the kind of excessive “particulars of right hand and left” against which she would, later in life, warn her niece Anna. Servants, when they appear in her books, are always used for more than to open doors, or to serve meals. Lady Bertram actually thinks of sending her own maid to help Fanny Price dress for her first ball, but, characteristically, sends her too late. Sir Thomas, on the other hand, though angry with Fanny for her refusal of Henry Crawford, remembers to tell a housemaid to light the fire that her Aunt Norris prohibited.
But in the main, Jane Austen’s servants are like the invisible hands of the fairy tale. We will never know what the footman thought who let a furious Emma out of the carriage in which Mr. Elton had proposed to her, nor whether the housekeeper at Pemberley approved of Elizabeth Bennet. Jane Austen has been accused of snobbery because of this omission, but it is merely another instance of her extraordinary sense of artistic proportion. There is no room, on her tiny piece of ivory, for what the butler saw. And, of course, she was writing for an audience who would take servants just as much for granted as she did herself. The “servant problem” with all its manifold snobberies, is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Meanwhile, that summer of 1806 provided plenty of varied country house experience. The Austen ladies were between homes, safely away, at last, from Bath, but not yet settled in Southampton. After the usual long visit at Stoneleigh Abbey, they went on to visit more cousins, the Coopers at Hamstall-Ridware, where Edward Cooper was rector. He was the son of Mrs. Austen’s sister Jane, who had caught diphtheria from the children, years before, and died of it. Jane does not seem to have thought very highly of his sermons, of which he published at least three volumes, but then her standards were high.
Martha Lloyd must have been engaged in her own round of visits, but by the autumn the three Austens were settled at last in Southampton. Frank Austen was temporarily without a ship and he and his new wife Mary joined forces with the Austen ladies, first in lodgings, then in a house in Castle Square. They were all hard up together and lived very quietly, but must have made a success of their odd household, since Mary (known as Mrs. F. A. to distinguish her from James’s less agreeable Mary) was always a much-loved sister-in-law. Just the same, the stresses and strains of a household consisting of one man and four women (later five, when Martha joined them) must have been fascinating material for Jane Austen, and, an inevitable complication, Mary was soon pregnant.
But before this, Jane Austen’s letters have taken up again. In January 1807, Cassandra was visiting the Edward Austens at Godmersham and Jane was busy at home with “the torments of rice pudding and apple dumplings”, caused by a visit from James and Mary Austen. Mary had invited Jane to go back to Steventon with them but, “I need not give my answer.” More practically, Mary had also invited Mrs. Austen to come to them when the other Mary was due to be confined, which Mrs. Austen “seems half inclined to do”. Jane herself had bad whooping cough and been disgusted by Madame de Genlis’ book Alphonsine: “It has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure; and we changed it for the Female Quixote, which now makes our evening amusement; to me a very high one as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it!” Charlotte Lennox’s skit on the novel had been written as early as 1752, and its heroine who supposed “romances were real pictures of life”, and “drew all her notions and expectations from them”, serves as a useful reminder that Northanger Abbey was not the only book to mock contemporary fictional absurdities; it was just the best.
On a more mundane note, Mrs. Austen had been surprised and pleased to find herself beginning the new year, 1807, with thirty pounds more in hand than the year before, “and when she has written her answer to my aunt, which you know always hangs a little upon her mind, she will be above the world entirely.” The aunt in question is, of course, Jane Leigh Perrot, and it does seem possible that the reference is to some kind of financial help from the rich Leigh Perrots to the poor Austens. We do know that Mrs. Leigh Perrot was giving Mrs. Austen a hundred pounds a year in 1821.
Frank, still without a ship, was poor too, and though he and his mother both felt they could manage their present expenses, they could not face “much increase of house-rent”. Frank felt that four hundred pounds a year must be his limit. But even in lodgings, there were naval friends of his to visit and to be visited by. Jane Austen has one of her realistic comments on one party. “They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance.”
Jane was missing Cassandra, whose return, as so often, had been delayed. “It is no use to lament,” she wrote. “I never heard that even Queen Mary’s lamentation did her any good, and I could not therefore expect benefit from mine.” Martha was still away, too, but there were pleasures for the little party in planning improvements to the house and garden in Castle Square into which they were to move in March. Lord Lansdowne was proving a co-operative landlord and Jane wanted a syringa for the garden “for the sake of Cowper’s line”. No doubt she got her “syringa ivory pure”.
They had been visited by the little daughter of friends, who “is now talking away at my side and examining the treasures of my writing-desk drawer”. It is a charming picture of Jane Austen writing her letter to Cassandra while the little girl played with the contents of the invaluable writing-desk. If Jane could entertain a child while she wrote a letter, it begins to seem less amazing that she managed to write the later novels in the busy atmosphere of the family living-room at Chawton. She had little privacy in her life, and plenty of practice in concentration.
She has an interesting comment on her child visitor. “What is become of all the shyness in the world?— Moral as well as natural diseases disappear in the course of time, and new ones take their place. Shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints.” The Bertram sisters were to suffer from no “natural shyness”, but Fanny Price must have been old-fashioned, perhaps more like Jane Austen herself, who goes on to describe little Catherine as “a nice, natural, openhearted, affectionate girl, with all the ready civility which one sees in the best children of the present day — so unlike anything that I was at her age that I am often all astonishment and shame.” There may have been some truth in that comment of Philadelphia Walter’s, years before, that the young Jane was “very prim ... whimsical and affected”. Jane had no doubt simply been shy with her older cousin.
Jane herself was well known in the family for her way with children. She had been an aunt since she was seventeen and had had plenty of opportunities to exercise her talent for dealing with the young on their own terms. Caroline Austen remembered that her aunt’s “charm to children was great sweetness of manner — she seemed to love you and you loved her naturally in return”. And, again, “Everything she could make amusing to a child.” She used to tell them “the most del
ightful stories chiefly of fairyland, and her fairies had all characters of their own”. Imagine Mrs. Norris as the wicked fairy at the christening. It was no wonder that “as a very little girl”, Caroline was always “creeping up to her [aunt], and following her”. And it is dismally characteristic of Caroline’s mother, James’s wife Mary, that she told little Caroline privately that she “must not be troublesome to my aunt”. Did Mary Austen add jealousy to her other disagreeable qualities?
At Southampton, there were visitors who presented greater problems than nice little Catherine. Incidentally, Henry Tilney would not have approved of Jane Austen’s use of that word “nice”, and perhaps the slipshod usage is an indication of the distraction the child was causing. Another visitor had called in vain. A friend of Frank’s wife Mary had paid her a visit when they were out, and, oddly, had left no address at which her call could be returned. After some puzzlement over this curious behaviour, the Austens decided that she must be staying with the Miss Pearson who had once been engaged to Henry. The brief episode was at least ten years dead, but apparently it still made visiting between the two families impossible. “What an unluckiness,” appropriately Jane Austen quotes Fanny Burney’s Madame Duval.
Where visiting was possible, it was not necessarily a pleasure. James was expected again, and either Cassandra’s scissors missed a passage, or Jane was more outspoken than usual. “I am sorry and angry that his visits should not give one more pleasure; the company of so good and so clever a man ought to be gratifying in itself — but his chat seems all forced, his opinions on many points too much copied from his wife’s, and his time here is spent I think in walking about the house and banging the doors, or ringing the bell for a glass of water.” James and Mary sound more and more like Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood.
Cassandra’s visit in Kent went on and on, and Martha too was still only promising to come to them. Apparently she had not yet joined the party in Southampton, for Jane promised to tell Cassandra “what she thinks of Mary” when she did. Mary’s confinement was getting nearer, and she asked, through Jane, for advice on various points from Elizabeth Austen, expert mother of ten. Frank was still at home and making himself useful about arrangements for the house into which they would move before the baby was born. “Frank has got a very bad cough, for an Austen — but it does not disable him from making very nice fringe for the drawing-room curtains.” They sound an agreeable household, with a hint of the Harvilles, and it is possible that Jane, with her gift of imagination, was better equipped than Cassandra or Martha to smooth the transition into the unusual ménage.
Other people had been inheriting money. A connection, John Austen, had succeeded to the estates of a cousin: “Such ill-gotten wealth can never prosper!” There was a good deal of rather wry joking between Jane and Cassandra about the legacies they never got: “Legacies are very wholesome diet.” Jane Leigh Perrot had written that Elliston, the actor, had just succeeded to a considerable fortune on the death of an uncle. And Jane Leigh Perrot herself was “in good humour and cheerful spirits ... The long negotiation between them and Adlestrop so happily over indeed, what can have power to vex her materially?” It is odd that this reference to the Leigh family settlement should be so different from Jane’s later remark about the “vile compromise”. Perhaps the Austens were not yet aware of the exact terms of the settlement. Anyway, as so often, there was money about, and none of it coming their way.
Cassandra’s return was delayed once again, but at least Martha seems to have got there in time to help with the move into the commodious house in Castle Square. “We hear that we are envied our house by many people,” said Jane, “and that the garden is the best in the town.” There are no letters after this one until the summer of 1808, so we do not know whether Cassandra was back for the birth of little Mary Jane Austen in April, or whether Mrs. Austen did pack up and go to stay with James and his Mary till it was all over.
Frank had taken command of H.M.S. St. Albans the month his child was born, and left for the Cape of Good Hope on convoy duty, not to return until the following year. The feminine household must have been a quiet one. Meanwhile Charles was still on the American station, enforcing the unpopular British blockade that was to lead, in the end, to war with the United States. In May of 1807 he married Frances Palmer, daughter of the Attorney-General of Bermuda, and she seems, like Mrs. Croft, to have spent most of her time on board ship with him. They were far from well off, so this was doubtless from economy as much as from choice. Meanwhile, his letters were providing Jane with the West Indian background for Mansfield Park. Always meticulous about accuracy of detail, she would know all about how the long war and consequent worsening of relations between Great Britain and the United States would affect Sir Thomas Bertram’s property in Antigua.
In the autumn of 1807 Mrs Austen and her daughters paid a visit to Chawton House, part of Edward’s Hampshire estate, where, presumably, he and his family were staying. Next spring they visited the James Austens at Steventon and then went on to stay with the Fowles at Kintbury. In June, Jane was writing from Godmersham to Cassandra, who was back with their mother in Castle Square. Jane had been staying with Henry and Eliza on her way to Kent. They were living comfortably in Brompton now, since Henry had changed careers and was a partner in a firm of bankers. Austen, Maunde and Tilson, Bankers, of 10, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, had connections with Austen, Gray and Vincent of Alton, Hampshire, which were ultimately to prove disastrous, but for the moment Henry was enjoying the “considerable share of riches and honours” that Eliza had predicted before she married him.
A later reference in Jane’s letters suggests that Eliza was still leading the fashionable life she enjoyed. Elizabeth Austen’s maid Sackree had also been in London on her way back from taking one of the Edward Austens’ sons to school. She and Jane “saw the ladies go to Court on the 4th”. June 4th was the King’s birthday and always ceremonially observed. Young ladies like Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda ordered special (and very expensive) dresses for the occasion, and no doubt Jane and Sackree watched and admired as Eliza put the finishing touches to her toilette. Sackree “had the advantage indeed of me in being in the Palace”. Presumably Sackree was taken along as lady’s maid. Jane Austen must have heard all about the splendid occasion, but, not having been there herself, she never sent a heroine to court. She left the experience, offstage, for Sir William Lucas and Sir Walter Elliot. If she troubled to describe Eliza’s birthday dress to Cassandra, the letter has not survived, but very likely she did not. Their own dress was a constant, and practical interest, but in her letters, as in her books, she spends little time on the description of frills and furbelows in general.
She had travelled from Brompton to Godmersham in the James Austens’ carriage. They had been staying at the Bath Hotel in London, “which, by-the-bye, had been found most uncomfortable quarters — very dirty, very noisy, and very ill-provided”. This sounds like a quotation from Mary. Doubtless partly because of lack of space in the carriage and partly because she did not get on very well with her stepmother, Anna Austen, James’s daughter by his first wife, had been left behind to stay with her grandmother in Castle Square. As it was, James had had to take the public coach, leaving Mary and Jane to travel down in his carriage with the two children, James Edward (author of the Memoir) and Caroline. Jane felt rather badly about this. “As James has no horse, I must feel in their carriage that I am taking his place. We were rather crowded yesterday, though it does not become me to say so, as I and my boa were of the party, and it is not to be supposed but that a child of three years of age was fidgety.”
Jane was finding it odd “to be at Godmersham without you”, and odder still to have such a great place as the yellow room all to herself. She had found Edward looking well, but could not say the same of Elizabeth, who was expecting her eleventh child. “I cannot praise Elizabeth’s looks, but they are probably affected by a cold.” Neither Elizabeth nor her eldest daughter, fifteen-year-old Fanny, would admit t
hat she was “fatigued by her attendance on the children”, but there were ten of them, after all, and Jane resolved that when Elizabeth’s sister Louisa left she would at least try to take her place in hearing the little girls read.
Jane, too, had a cold and admitted to feeling “rather languid and solitary”. The company on this visit was clearly not so much to her taste as it had been on the previous one when Cassandra had accompanied her, and Elizabeth’s older sister, Harriot Bridges had been there. Harriot had married a Mr. Moore in the meantime and Cassandra and Jane seem to have had their doubts about him. “I will not pretend in one meeting to dislike him, whatever Mary may say, but I can honestly assure her that I saw nothing in him to admire.” The Moores had a little girl by now, and, “Harriot’s fondness for her seems just what is amiable and natural, and not foolish.”
Jane Austen has been accused of disliking children, but what, in fact, she very reasonably disliked were spoiled children, like the little Middletons. When she comments on James Edward Austen’s behaviour at table: “He was almost too happy, his happiness at least made him too talkative,” she reminds us of Elinor Dashwood: “I confess ... that while I am at Barton Park, I never think of tame and quiet children with any abhorrence.” It is doubtful whether the ten young Austens of Godmersham were always, or often, “tame and quiet”. A later letter reports that, “Mary finds the children less troublesome than she expected, and independent of them, there is certainly not much to try the patience or hurt the spirits at Godmersham.” An observant aunt, Jane has comments for her sister on the growth and development of Edward’s children, and a perceptive remark on their relations with their visiting cousins, James and Mary’s two children, Edward “is very happy here ... but I believe the little girl will be glad to go home — her cousins are too much for her.” Caroline was sitting for the portrait of Fanny Price. “I have tried to give James pleasure by telling him of his daughter’s taste, but if he felt, he did not express it — I rejoice in it very sincerely.” Here, too, is a hint for the Bertram family’s unawareness of Fanny. And it is surely more than a coincidence that in the same letter Jane is debating the relative merits of a silver knife and a brooch as a present for Frank’s Mary. Fanny Price, whose uncle had given her ten pounds for her trip to Portsmouth, was to find that “wealth is luxurious and daring”. Some of the money was used to join a circulating library, and some to buy a little silver knife for her sister.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 12