Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  Jane had had a letter from Edward’s adoptive mother, old Mrs. Knight, “containing the usual fee, and all the usual kindness”, and was to spend a few days with her. “Her very agreeable present will make my circumstances quite easy.” The visit, when it happened, was an extremely lively one, with a constant stream of other guests, so that it was “a matter of wonder to me, that Mrs. K. and I should ever have been ten minutes alone ... Yet we had time to say a little of everything.” Mrs. Knight obviously liked Cassandra and Jane and was loved in return. “I cannot help regretting,” said Jane, “that now, when I feel enough her equal to relish her society, I see so little” of her.

  Back at Godmersham, Jane wrote letters full of family news. Frank was expected home shortly in the St. Albans ... Mrs. Austen was to visit the James Austens on their return to Steventon and, “You and I and Martha shall have a snug fortnight while my mother is at Steventon.” There was gossip to report, too. “Mr. Waller is dead I see — I cannot grieve about it, nor perhaps can his widow very much.” Jane would not pretend to feelings she did not have. There was also “a sad story about Mrs. Powlett”, who had eloped with a viscount and thus no doubt provided another of those tiny grains of material Jane Austen was unconsciously collecting for her next book, Mansfield Park.

  Talking of books, James was reading Scott’s new poem aloud in the evenings. “Ought I to be very much pleased with Mannion? — as yet I am not.” Perhaps James was better at sermons than at Scott. As for Jane, she was suffering from the usual problems about getting home. “But till I have a travelling purse of my own, I must submit to such things.” She had refused an invitation from Edward and Elizabeth to stay on until the autumn because she and Cassandra were hoping for a visit from their friends the Misses Bigg. For some reason this visit must be kept a secret from James and Mary. It would have been like the James Austens to be still remembering that unlucky night’s engagement with the Bigg girls’ brother Harris, and the day James had to miss his Sunday duty as a result.

  Jane, on the other hand, was much looking forward to Alethea and Catherine Bigg’s visit, which would more than compensate for the comparative austerity of life in Castle Square after the luxury of Godmersham.

  In another week I shall be at home and then, my having been at Godmersham will seem like a dream, as my visit at Brompton seems already. The orange wine will want our care soon — But in the mean-time for elegance and ease and luxury —; the Hattons and Milles dine here today — and I shall eat ice and drink French wine, and be above vulgar economy. Luckily the pleasures of friendship, of un-reserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinions, will make good amends for orange wine.

  Jane Austen always had her priorities right. Perhaps she was already brooding about the plight of Fanny Price when Henry Crawford proposed to her and the world of wealth was suddenly at her feet.

  Something of the kind may just possibly have happened to Jane herself in the course of this visit. Writing to Cassandra in October when she, in her turn, was staying at Godmersham, Jane said, “I wish you may be able to accept Lady Bridges’ invitation, though I could not her son Edward’s.” Edward Bridges was a clergymen four years younger than Jane Austen and certainly had marriage ill mind. In November, Jane wrote, “Your news of Edward Bridges was quite news ... I wish him happy with all my heart, and hope his choice may turn out according to his own expectations, and beyond those of his family ... As to money, that will come you may be sure, because they cannot do without it.” From the tone of this it does rather sound as if Jane was reassuring Cassandra about her own feelings. Edward Bridges may have been like Captain Benwick who moved swiftly from a romantic friendship with Anne Elliot into marriage with Louisa Musgrove. If he did, in fact, propose to the thirty-two-year-old Aunt Jane, she cannot have settled quite so firmly into the appearance and manner of spinsterhood as the family’s later recollections suggest.

  Cassandra had gone to Godmersham to be with her sister-in-law for the birth of her eleventh child, and the first of this batch of Jane’s letters is in answer to one reporting the birth of little John. It is a cheerful letter, describing the sociabilities of Southampton. They had had unexpected callers, “and our labour was not a great deal shorter than poor Elizabeth’s, for it was past eleven before we were delivered”. The arrangement with the Frank Austens showed signs of coming to an end. Frank and Mary were in Yarmouth now, “and with fish almost for nothing, and plenty of engagements and plenty of each other, must be very happy.” Mrs. Austen had heard that houses could be rented for as little as a hundred and thirty pounds at Alton and was seriously thinking of moving there. The house in Castle Square would doubtless be too expensive for the diminished party.

  Martha was away visiting, and Jane Austen and her mother were entertaining each other by reading aloud the Letters of Espriella. “The man describes well, but is horribly anti-English. He deserves to be the foreigner he assumes.” Southey, who wrote these pretended letters from a young Spanish visitor to England, would no doubt have thought Jane Austen’s comment high praise. She was always a passionate Englishwoman. Her next letter congratulates Edward on completing his thirtieth year and is full of the usual cheerful gossip: “The Miss Ms were as civil and as silly as usual.” There had been a fire in Southampton and Jane admitted that, “One could not but feel uncomfortable, and I began to think of what I should do, if it came to the worst.” She doubtless made extremely sensible plans, but luckily they were not needed. The fire engines soon had the fire under control, though not before there had been panic and looting. It was an experience that would have found its way swiftly into a novel by Fanny Burney or Maria Edgeworth, or, of course, Charlotte Brontë, but was useless as raw material to Jane Austen.

  She was much more interested in the character of their niece Fanny, Edward’s eldest daughter, who was now fifteen. “I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny; I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another sister — and could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me.” There were nephews, too, to be discussed. Martha had returned to Southampton by way of Winchester, where she had three boys to take out from the College. They were Edward and George Austen, sons of Edward senior, and her own nephew, William Fowle, her sister Eliza’s son. Jane was able to report to Cassandra that Edward Austen’s manners were excellent and that George reminded Martha of his Uncle Henry.

  Their friend Catherine Bigg was to be married that month, to a clergyman called Herbert Hill, and this apparently secret engagement may be the explanation of the odd silence that had had to be maintained about the Bigg sisters’ visit to Southampton that summer. It was to be the last one before Catherine’s marriage. She remained a close friend, and Jane Austen was to visit her and her husband at Streatham. He was Southey’s uncle, but there are no letters of Jane’s from Streatham, so one can only conjecture about possible meetings with Southey or even with Wordsworth or Coleridge. Jane Austen liked to illuminate her characters by comments on their favourite writers, but she has only one reference to the authors of Lyrical Ballads, which had appeared in 1798. Sir Edward Denham, in Sanditon, thinks that Wordsworth has “the true soul” of poetry. But praise from Sir Edward is not to be confused with praise from Miss Austen.

  Jane’s letter of October 7th ends on a note of unconscious irony. “We must turn our black pelisses into new, for velvet is to be very much worn this winter.” On the eighth, Elizabeth Austen died suddenly. Eleven children had been too many, and Jane had been right to be anxious about her looks in the summer. At Southampton, they had the first news from James’s wife Mary, who had written Martha a quick note on her way to collect the Austen boys from school at Winchester. Cassandra’s letter arrived next day. “And with much melancholy anxiety was it expected. We have felt, we do feel, for you all.” There is no doubt about the genuineness of the feeling. Jane wrote again a few days later. “Edward’s loss is terrible, and must be felt as such.” And, of little Lizzy Austen, “One’s heart aches for a d
ejected mind of eight years old.” Always practical, Jane was sending Cassandra her mourning. The black velvet was indeed to be in use. More important, she was concerned for her nephews, Edward and George Austen, who had been removed from school by their Aunt Mary and taken back to Steventon. Jane was not happy about this arrangement, though she made the best of it. “They will have more means of exercise and amusement there than they could have with us, but I own myself disappointed by the arrangement — I should have loved to have them with me at such a time. I shall write to Edward by this post.”

  The result of her letter was immediate. On the twenty-fourth she was able to report that Edward and George had arrived two days before. Edward was fourteen and George almost thirteen, and their aunt was doing her best to keep them occupied. There was cup-and-ball, for which she had such a talent, “spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards ... watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out”. Later she took them boating and let them go over a seventy-four-gun ship at Northam. No doubt an aunt who could tell such entrancing fairy stories to her nieces, could also distract her nephews, in their grief, with real-life stories of the adventures of their sailor uncles.

  It was probably a relief to her to be so busy entertaining them, for this death had hit her hard. It shows in her style. She may have busied herself with bilbocatch and ordering black pantaloons for the boys, but she thought all the time about the stricken household at Godmersham. “I see your mournful party in my mind’s eye under every varying circumstance of the day ... poor Edward, restless in misery, going from one room to the other, and perhaps not seldom upstairs, to see all that remains of his Elizabeth.” And, of the funeral that would put an end at least to this misery: “Glad shall I be to hear that it is over.” There are times when it is not convenient to have too much imagination.

  Edward’s tragedy, and perhaps the support Cassandra had been to him through it, had turned his thoughts to his mother and sisters. By the time Jane wrote to tell of her nephews’ arrival, Mrs. Austen had had a letter from their father offering her a choice of two of the various houses he owned. One was near to his own at Godmersham, the other on his other estate at Chawton in Hampshire. Perhaps he hoped that his mother and the two invaluable aunts would settle near him and help with the education of his eleven motherless children. If so, it was handsome of him to offer the alternative, which his mother, characteristically, accepted. She had not visited Kent for years, and she was not going there now. The house that had been occupied by Edward’s steward at Chawton was gratefully accepted, and one can only wonder that the offer had not been made sooner.

  9

  While Cassandra stayed with the motherless family in Kent, plans for the move to Chawton went on apace. Mrs. Austen was relieved to hear that the house had six bedrooms, besides garrets which could be made into rooms for Edward’s manservant when he came to stay, and perhaps for one of their own. With no rent to pay, the little family could plan a slight relaxation of their stringent economy. It sounds, too, from a comment by Jane on a disagreeable letter they had had from Aunt Jane Leigh Perrot as if they were perhaps getting some help, though of a grudging kind, from that quarter. Unfortunately, Henry was involved in the arrangements about this, and Henry does seem to have had a talent for making muddles, though in the nicest possible way.

  There was a by-election for the county of Hampshire that autumn, and Thomas Heathcote, brother-in-law of the Bigg sisters, was standing. Jane Austen wrote knowledgeably about it. Alethea Bigg had written asking for her interest, “which I conclude means Edward’s,” said Jane, and asked for it. Mr. Heathcote had been returned for Bletchingley in the election of 1807, but now seemed to have come to some private arrangement with the sitting member for Hampshire, Mr. Thistlewaite, who preferred not to stand again, “acknowledging himself still smarting under the payment of late electioneering costs”. Such arrangements were mere routine in those pre-Reform days, and it was an expensive business to get into Parliament, but Mr. Heathcote managed it, and sat for Hampshire, first as Mr. and then as Sir Thomas Heathcote, until 1820.

  With easier times ahead, the little party seem to have lived an unusually social life that autumn. Jane planned to take Martha to the Southampton theatre for the first time, and also to go to “as many balls as possible, that I may have a good bargain”. She and Martha had been to one of the Southampton Assemblies and found perhaps thirty couples of dancers, but, “The melancholy part was, to see so many young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders!” After this comment on the new fashions, Jane went on, “It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago! —I thought it all over — and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.” She may have been beginning to discover the advantages of cheerfully admitted spinsterhood, of having outgrown the anguish of a partnerless Catherine Morland, suffering “the discredit of wanting a partner”. In fact, she reported with wry amusement that she had actually been asked to dance, apparently by a French émigré, who “seems so little at home in the English language that I believe that his black eyes may be the best of him”.

  There were marriages to report, and to speculate about. Mr. Sloper had married a governess (and of somebody’s natural children at that), and Lady Sondes’s “match surprises but does not offend me ... I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can.” The Godmersham family had decided that Jane must marry the bachelor Rector of Chawton, Mr. Papillon, and Jane retaliated by pretending to think that Cassandra would soon receive a proposal from Edward’s brother-in-law, Sir Brook Bridges, whose wife had died in 1806. This reiterated joke about possible marriages was very probably part Austen-nonsense, part a necessary defence against the implied ignominy of spinsterhood. Jane sent a message to Mrs. Knight. “She may depend upon it, I will marry Mr. Papillon, whatever may be his reluctance or my own — I owe her much more than such a trifling sacrifice.” The kind hopes of their friends may have been becoming hard to bear.

  A chance reference in the same letter suggests Jane Austen’s best defence against what Henry Tilney called the “neighbourhood of voluntary spies”. She had met someone named Emma, which was worth an exclamation mark, no doubt in reference to Emma Watson, rather than Emma Woodhouse. There might be small pin-pricks, and some greater ones, but there was always the secret consolation of the double life. Everything was possible material for Jane Austen, who felt like an author even if she was still an unpublished one. The Watsons’ circumstances were worse than the Austens’, although Jane had a slight financial blow to report. The Leigh Perrots had settled a hundred pounds a year on James, to compensate him for highmindedly refusing to commit the contemporary sin of pluralism by accepting another living. Mary had sent Mrs. Austen her sister-in-law’s letter on the occasion and, “Nothing can be more affectionate than my aunt’s language in making the present, and likewise in expressing her hope of their being much more together in future.” It sounds as if the Leigh Perrots had decided to forget and forgive at least James for that enforced neglect at the time of the trial. Jane Austen adds, “My expectations for my mother do not rise with this event.” She later reported that they had calculated James’s income as “eleven hundred pounds, curate paid”. The world went right on enriching one part of the Austen family at the expense of the other.

  They had a visit from Frank and Mary, probably to collect little Mary Jane, who had been staying at Castle Square, but, Jane wrote, “The St. Albans perhaps may soon be off to bring home what may remain by this time of our poor army.” She was referring to Sir John Moore’s long, terrible retreat through Spain that ended with his death at Corunna. And she was nearly right about Frank. In fact he was active in the disembarkation in England of the battered remnant of Moore’s army. She was close, too, in her speculations, in this same letter, about a possible Regency. George III had been mad, off and on, for years, but his son d
id not actually become Prince Regent until 1811.

  Writing to her sister, Jane was more concerned with family news. They had heard by roundabout means that Charles and Frances were well at Bermuda. “You may guess in what extravagant terms of praise Earle Harwood speaks of him. He is looked up to by everyone in America.” Earle Harwood was the young man who had made the unfortunate marriage and then shot himself accidentally in the leg. His praise must have been a little too extravagant for Jane’s taste, judging by the little glint of irony in her tone. There was good news, too, of Eliza Austen, who had been unwell, but was now recovered, and of her husband, whose bank was flourishing, as banks do in time of war.

  There were plans about silver and china for Chawton, and, “Yes, yes, we will have a pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for thirty guineas, and I will practise country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews and nieces.” The piano Jane Austen had had to sell when they moved to Bath was to be replaced at last. The nephews and nieces were growing up. Fanny was to take her dead mother’s place at Godmersham when Cassandra’s long visit ended, and Anna had been to her first ball, a private one at Manydown. It “was a smaller thing than I expected, but it seems to have made Anna very happy. At her age,” says Jane Austen, “it would not have done for me.”