There were books to be discussed. “We are now in Margiana, [by Mrs Sykes], and like it very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain.” Jane Austen had the gift of enjoyment, but she could also be critical. “We have got Ida of Athens by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written as the authoress says, in three months.” Jane Austen, that meticulous polisher, might well have added that, like Anna’s ball, “It would not have done for me.” Their cousin, Edward Cooper, had a third volume of sermons out, “which we are to like better than the two others,” and Jane was looking forward somewhat dubiously to Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife. “I do not like the Evangelicals — Of course I shall be delighted, when I read it, like other people, but till I do I dislike it.” Years later, in her Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh was to quote a contemporary’s opinion. “Miss Austen had on all the subjects of enduring religious feeling the deepest and strongest convictions, but a contact with loud and noisy exponents of the then popular religious phase made her reticent almost to a fault.”
It is impossible, at this remove, to tell just what that reticence hid. Certainly Jane’s letters to Cassandra on the death of Elizabeth Austen show more than mechanical religious feeling. “May the Almighty sustain you all”, and, “Tell Edward that we feel for him and pray for him.” But, while remembering the virtues of the departed, “her solid principles, her true devotion”, Jane Austen has no phrase, as in her letter on her father’s death, about Elizabeth’s being “blessed in heaven”.
On the other hand, a comment on the death of Sir John Moore has brought her under a fire of angry criticism ever since. “I wish Sir John had united something of the Christian with the hero in his death.” This does seem to be one of the rare occasions when Jane Austen, that splendid realist, failed to “clear her mind of cant”.[8] Sir John, dying on the field of battle, was preoccupied with the duty he had left unfinished, and with thoughts of friends at home, and the reports of his death omit any reference to God or a life to come. For once, it is fair to say, Jane Austen’s imagination failed her, but then, how could she know what it would be like to die under such circumstances? It is even possible that she did not want to know, since it could so easily happen, at any moment, to either Frank or Charles. The strong, selective spirit that limited her field of work, may have operated in the same way on her sympathies. When she could not afford to feel sympathy, she did not let herself imagine too deeply. It would account for this remark and for a few others, like that curiously heartless one about Mrs. Hall and her dead baby.
But I think there was more to it than that. After July 1809 there are no letters extant for almost two years. We know from the letters written in the spring of 1809 that extensive family visiting was planned for that summer, before they moved to Chawton. They were at Godmersham that spring and one would have expected that both aunts would pay frequent visits to Edward’s motherless household; but, in fact, Jane did not go there again for four years. Cassandra, however, almost certainly did. There must have been letters for this period, and they must have been committed by Cassandra to that lamentable bonfire.
Why did she do this? What was the matter? There may have been practical problems about the move to Chawton, although once he had made up his mind to house his mother and sisters, Edward seems to have been lavish in the way of alterations and enlargements. But the trouble was probably at a deeper level. A recent psychological study (in Work, Creativity, Social Justice by Professor Elliott Jaques) has suggested that artists tend, even more than ordinary people, to go through an emotional crisis in their middle years, and, indeed, that they have a higher than average mortality rate at this time of life.
In 1808, Jane Austen was only thirty-two, but it is easy to see why her crisis should have come early. For her, the problem of the artist was compounded by that of the woman. As a woman of her time she could be said to be a failure. She was poor, and unmarried, and could look forward, apparently, to nothing but decline and fall. Worst of all, and no doubt worse still, because it would be almost impossible to admit, was the fact that she, Cassandra and their friend Martha were bound, for her lifetime, to old Mrs. Austen. Those tell-tale occasional remarks in the letters about how snug they will be while Mrs. Austen is off visiting are a total giveaway here.
There was no possible escape, even if they had been so heartless as to consider it, which Jane Austen, with her strong sense of family duty, would never have done. Aristocrats, like the Ladies of Llangollen might possibly set up housekeeping together and survive socially, though it was touch and go with them, but for young women of the middle classes it was, simply, impossible. Besides, there would have been no money. The Austen brothers might subsidise the respectable household of mother and sisters, but they would never have supported a breakaway.
Was it in a spirit of optimism or despair that Jane Austen made, in 1809, one more attempt at getting published? She did it herself, rather than getting Henry to act for her, as she was to do later. She wrote, under the assumed name of Mrs. Ashton Dennis, to Crosby, the publisher who had accepted Susan back in 1803. Why had the book never been published, she asked, since “early publication was stipulated for at the time of sale”. If the publishers had lost their copy, she would undertake to provide another one. Should they not answer her letter, she would feel free to attempt publication elsewhere. It was a firm letter, and got a firm answer. Richard Crosby wrote by return to say that they had indeed bought Susan outright for ten pounds cash, “but there was not any time stipulated for its publication, neither are we bound to publish it”. He went on to threaten proceedings if she published elsewhere, and offer her the manuscript back for the ten pounds it had fetched.
It must have been a bitterly disappointing letter, and Jane Austen clearly did not feel able to venture half her annual allowance (if she was in fact still getting twenty pounds) on such a chimera. Silence falls on Susan until 1816. And only one more letter of Jane Austen’s remains before silence falls on her too. It is in verse, congratulating Frank on the birth of a son, and ending with a happy description of Chawton:
Our Chawton home, how much we find
Already in it, to our mind;
And how convinced, that when complete
It will all other houses beat
That ever have been made or mended,
With rooms concise, or rooms distended.
You’ll find us very snug next year.
One can only hope that she was right. On the surface, the prospect certainly seemed fair enough. The rooms at Chawton may have been “concise” rather than “distended”, but Edward was busy seeing to it that his mother and sisters would be comfortable there, and later family descriptions make it sound a delightful place, with its rambling out-buildings for children to play in, and old-fashioned garden. It still stands, now, as then, on a busy corner, but these days it is motor-coaches, loaded with tourists in search of Jane Austen, that crowd the way, not the stage-coaches that visiting nieces loved to hear sweep by in the night. In fact, people in carriages could look right in at the dining-room window, and the last glimpse we get of the Austen ladies before silence falls in 1809, is a chance remark by Mrs. Knight that an acquaintance of hers had seen “the Chawton party looking very comfortable at breakfast”, from his post-chaise.
Mrs. Austen had entirely given over the housekeeping to her daughters by now, and Jane’s duty was to make breakfast at nine o’clock. According to her niece Caroline Austen, this, and “the tea and sugar stores were under her charge — and the wine. And Cassandra did all the rest.” Mrs. Austen, meanwhile, was indulging in her passion for gardening. Dressed in a green round smock like a labourer’s, she was to keep at it in the Chawton garden almost until the end of her life. It is oddly reminiscent of that scarlet outfit she wore for the early years of her marriage, and then cut down into a riding
habit for Frank. One cannot help liking Mrs. Austen, and regretting that she and her daughters had, somewhere, somehow, parted company in spirit, if not, unfortunately, in fact.
Life at Chawton, as reported, later, by the nieces, sounds quiet and pleasant. Jane played the piano before she made breakfast. According to Caroline she could never be induced to play in company, though “she played very pretty tunes, I thought”. They were not a musical family and playing the piano may have been Jane’s way of achieving privacy. Was she busy plotting her next book while she played the tunes that nieces were to dismiss, kindly, as pretty but rather simple? Or was she, for a while, wrestling with darker matters?
Certainly this interlude at the piano seems to have been her last private moment of the day. After breakfast the ladies sat “at work” in the drawing-room, perhaps doing the embroidery for which Jane was known, or perhaps, more prosaically, making clothes for the poor. After lunch, if the weather was fine, they would walk over to the Great House half a mile away, if one of the brothers was staying there, as they often were, with their families. If no one was there to be visited, they would stroll among the beech trees of Chawton Park, perhaps leaving old Mrs. Austen at home in her smock, hard at it in the garden.
Sometimes, but rarely, according to Caroline, they would go calling. They had no carriage, so that their range was inevitably limited to their immediate vicinity, which had not very much to offer. Again we have Caroline’s authority. She was only five when her grandmother moved to Chawton, an easy morning’s ride from her home at Steventon, but Anna Austen, her half-sister, was sixteen and they both helped their brother Edward with recollections for his Memoir, and obviously they were the members of the family best calculated to know what life was really like at Chawton.
It probably did not change much over the years. In the light of the letters, Caroline’s description of them as on “friendly, but rather distant terms” with the neighbours rings true. The Austens did tend to be sufficient unto themselves. But Jane Austen “liked immensely” to hear about the neighbours. “They sometimes served for her amusement, but it was her own nonsense that gave zest to the gossip. She never turned them into ridicule ... she never abused them or ‘quizzed’ them ...”
A younger niece (perhaps Marianne Austen from Godmersham, who was eight in 1809) went further. “She was in fact one of the last people in society to be afraid of. I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing. She was naturally shy and not given to talk much in company, and people fancied, knowing that she was clever, that she was on the watch for good material for books from their conversation. Her intimate friends knew how groundless was the apprehension and that it wronged her.” This, of course, refers to a later date, when Henry had betrayed the secret of her authorship, but she would presumably not have grown more shy with time. One can imagine her as one of those quiet people who only light up for a sympathetic listener. Anna, old enough at this time to notice, has a significant comment. Cassandra and Jane, she said, “were everything to each other. They seemed to lead a life to themselves within the general family life which was shared only by each other. I will not say their true, but their full, feelings and opinions were known only to themselves.”
Anna also describes her aunt, presumably at about this time. “The figure tall and slight, but not drooping; well balanced, as was proved by her quick firm step. Her complexion of that rare sort which seems the particular property of light brunettes; a mottled skin, not fair but perfectly clear and healthy; the fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, and the rather small, but well-shaped nose.” Jane Austen, she said, was not regularly handsome, but attractive. According to Caroline Austen, “Aunt Jane’s ... was the first face that I can remember thinking pretty ... Her face was rather round than long; she had a bright, but not a pink, colour, a clear brown complexion and very good hazel eyes. Her hair, a darkish brown, curled naturally in short curls round her face ... She always wore a cap.” And James Edward, drawing on both his sister and his half-sister’s recollection for his Memoir sums it up. “In her person she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation.”
The only certainly authentic picture of Jane Austen that survives is by Cassandra and, inevitably, does not do justice to its subject, making her look plump, prim and pop-eyed. It is, perhaps, possible to get a better idea of her real appearance by studying the portraits of the brothers older and younger than herself, Frank and Charles. They are remarkably alike, and remarkably like Cassandra’s unsuccessful picture of Jane. Both their faces are handsome, firm and intelligent with the kind of piercing eyes one would expect equally in a successful Admiral of the Fleet, and an even more successful lady novelist.
But in 1809, at Chawton, Jane Austen was merely Aunt Jane, playing the piano before she made breakfast. What was she thinking of, protected, there, by the simple tunes she played and sang, by The Soldier’s Adieu or The Yellow-Haired Laddie? I think she was going through a severe moral and religious crisis, during which the author of romantic comedy, of Susan and First Impressions, developed, painfully, into the grave moralist and extraordinary technician who could produce Mansfield Park.
The silence is absolute, and one can only speculate. But there are hints, here and there. In 1808, talking of Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Jane had said, flatly, “I do not like the Evangelicals.” And, confirming this, is that remark of an acquaintance that “a contact with loud and noisy exponents of the then popular religious phase made her reticent almost to a fault”. By 1814 she would be writing to her beloved niece Fanny, in a crisis of the latter’s life, “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling, must be happiest and safest.” Cassandra has left us no way of knowing what moral gulfs, what cold loneliness lies between these two positions, but somewhere, I think, in the critical years of her mid-thirties, the light-hearted creator of First Impressions must have passed through a moral climacteric that turned her into the mature artist of Mansfield Park.
Which is not to say that Mansfield Park is an unqualified success. There is something very significant about Jane Austen’s own reservation in her letter about the Evangelicals. She was “at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling, must be happiest and safest”. It leaves one wondering just what her own reason and feeling were telling her. We have no idea. In this passage, she sounds curiously like someone of our own times saying how much they would like to believe in God, if only they could. Possibly, during the silent first years at Chawton, she had found it difficult, at least in contemporary terms. She had lived all her life among clergymen, and may have known too much about them for her own moral comfort. It is impossible to forget that picture of James, “It makes me sad and angry ...” In a fascinating essay on Jane Austen and the Moralists (reprinted in B. C. Southam’s Critical Essays on Jane Austen), Professor Gilbert Ryle points out that Jane Austen’s heroines “face their moral difficulties and solve their moral problems without recourse to religious faith or theological doctrines. Nor does it ever occur to them to seek the counsels of a clergyman.” It is indeed hard to imagine Elizabeth Bennet turning to Mr. Collins for advice, or Emma to Mr. Elton. As for Edmund Bertram, the fledgling clergyman, significantly, it is he who turns to Fanny Price. Determined to yield to pressure, and act in Lovers’ Vows, he comes to her for encouragement, and does not get it. “Give me your approbation, then, Fanny. I am not comfortable without it.”
And Fanny, having compromised with him in a speech that suggests a moral novelist of our own time, Ivy Compton-Burnett, does not, when alone, burst into either prayer or tears. She sits down to consider her position morally and rationally, as, perhaps, Jane Austen had considered her own in the silent years of crisis. The result, for Fanny, was, for the time being, loneliness and misery. We have only the later books an
d letters as clues to how Jane Austen came out of her spiritual crisis, but I think this was the time when the laughter of youth turned into the double-visioned irony of maturity.
But all this was below the surface. Superficially, I am sure the double life went on as usual. Whatever Jane Austen thought or suffered, she continued to behave like an English lady, the daughter and sister of clergymen. She was to die, as she had lived, a good daughter of the Church, insisting on taking the sacrament, from her two clergymen brothers, while she was still conscious to receive it; and a passing remark about her nephew in 1813 shows how seriously she took the forms of religion. Perhaps she told Cassandra what she thought of its essence, but I doubt it. Even sharing a room with a beloved sister, the artist is inevitably alone. Perhaps she did not know herself; perhaps, always, in her books, she was trying to decide. In which case Sanditon suggests a dramatic new departure.
But that was still in the future. In the present, Jane Austen played the piano and made the breakfast and (incredibly) convinced her nieces that she never “said a sharp thing”. Or was this, perhaps, the loving error of retrospection? At all events, the silent years at Chawton passed, with visits to the Great House and shopping excursions to the nearby town of Alton, and, most important of all, with Jane Austen, at some point, beginning to write again. She began, sensibly after the long silence, by revising her early work. She was always a passionate reviser and polisher, and, at this point, apparently, her hand lit on Sense and Sensibility, which had already been redrafted from her original Elinor and Marianne. If I am right in my assumption of a moral crisis over, Sense and Sensibility, the most moral of her early works, was a logical choice, and indeed this is an added confirmation of the theory. Otherwise, Pride and Prejudice, the family favourite, would have seemed the obvious choice for a new attempt at publication. But if Jane Austen wanted to try out her new, ironic view of life, her new detachment, what better vehicle than Sense and Sensibility, with its almost too obvious moral contrasts? If only she had left us her original version, much of this speculation would probably be unnecessary.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 14