Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  The next letter raises some objections: “more than you will like”. There are small points of etiquette and, more serious, “Your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left.” It is a failing that could never be attributed to Jane Austen herself. Then comes a famous piece of praise: “You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; — three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on ... You are but now coming to the heart and beauty of your book; till the heroine grows up, the fun must be imperfect.” It is pleasant to think that Jane Austen thought in terms of “fun” for both author and reader. The young author was perhaps feeling her oats, for her aunt felt it necessary to caution her on a point of style. “Devereux Forester’s being ruined by his vanity is extremely good; but I wish you would not let him plunge into a ‘vortex of dissipation’. I do not object to the thing,” went on practical Aunt Jane, “but I cannot bear the expression — it is such thorough novel slang — and so old, that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.”

  Waverley had just been published anonymously, but Jane Austen was in no doubt as to the author. “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones — It is not fair — He had fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths — I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it — but fear I must ... I have made up my mind to like no novels really, but Miss Edgeworth’s, yours and my own.” Unfortunately, Anna’s book does not survive, so we cannot fully appreciate her aunt’s meticulous criticism. Many years later, after Jane Austen’s death she got out the manuscript they had worked over together, and burned it.

  Henry moved from Henrietta Street to Hans Place that summer, and Jane actually went up by herself in the public coach to visit him, and wrote a cheerful report of the journey to Cassandra: “It put me in mind of my own coach between Edinburgh and Stirling.” Jane could rely on Cassandra to recognise the reference to the young man in Love and Freindship who spent all his wife’s money, sold everything they had except their coach, and made his living by driving to and fro between Edinburgh and Stirling. Henry had been visiting Godmersham and could tell Jane about the Canterbury Races and Fanny’s partners at the grand ball that accompanied them. Mr. Plumtre was still in evidence.

  Jane apparently had had doubts about Henry’s new house in Hans Place but, “Having got rid of my unreasonable ideas, I find more space and comfort in the rooms that I had supposed, and the garden is quite a love.” One tends to forget how London still blended into country. Henry’s move may have indicated serious thoughts of re-marriage, for Jane writes, “Henry wants me to see more of his Hanwell favourite, and has written to invite her to spend a day or two here with me ... I am more and more convinced that he will marry again soon, and like the idea of her better than anybody else in hand.” The “Hanwell favourite” was Miss Eliza Moore of Hanwell, who reappears later in the letters, but in fact Henry did not remarry until 1820, three years after Jane’s death.

  Henry was to take Jane home to Chawton, and she was there in September when they received the news of the death of Charles’s wife Fanny on the birth of her fourth child. She died at the Nore, where Charles was stationed, and their older daughter, “that puss Cassy”, spent a good deal of time from then on with her grandmother and aunts at Chawton. Charles, left with three motherless girls, finally married Fanny’s sister Harriet, who had helped to look after them, in 1820, a good year for Austen marriages. There is no letter from Jane to Cassandra about their sister-in-law’s death, but, writing to Anna, she seems mainly concerned about its effect on their mother, who “does not seem the worse now for the shock”. It meant a temporary end to the public reading aloud of Anna’s book, but, “I have read it to your Aunt Cassandra however — in our own room at night, while we undressed — and with a great deal of pleasure.” It is one of those small, important reminders of the intensely private life that the two sisters lived together in their tiny back bedroom at Chawton.

  While Anna Austen wrote for advice about her novel, Fanny Knight needed it on a more serious subject. Henry had been right in suspecting a romance between her and John Plumtre, and apparently she had talked to her Aunt Jane about her feelings when they were in London together in the summer. Now, in November, she had changed her mind about the suitor her aunt had earlier described as “a very amiable young man, only too diffident to be so agreeable as he might be”. Fanny’s letter has not survived, but it had surprised her aunt very much. “What strange creatures we are! — It seems as if your being secure of him (as you say yourself) had made you indifferent.” Fanny’s was a serious situation: “What is to be done? You certainly have encouraged him to such a point as to make him feel almost secure of you.” Jane went on to plead the young man’s cause eloquently. His difficulty seems to have been a lack of manner, particularly when compared with Fanny’s own “agreeable, idle brothers”. But, said Jane, “Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” It sounds as if John Plumtre would have just done for Fanny Price. “As to there being any objection from his goodness,” said Jane Austen, “from the danger of his becoming even Evangelical, I cannot admit that. I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals.”

  And then, like the good aunt and intelligent woman that she was, she turned round and argued the other side of the case. “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection; and if his deficiencies of manner &c &c strike you more than all his good qualities, if you continue to think strongly of them, give him up at once ... I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time ... but it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments kill anybody.” And, in a postscript, the woman of genius reduced the situation to its true proportions: “Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively — The dirty shaving rag was exquisite! — Such a circumstance ought to be in print. Much too good to be lost.” Nor was it. Did Fanny recognise herself in Harriet Smith and her court-plaster?

  The two letters Jane Austen wrote to Fanny that autumn about John Plumtre give one a frightening picture of the total lack of privacy in her life. This was a subject, apparently, that must be kept secret even from Cassandra, and when the first letter arrived, “Luckily your Aunt Cassandra dined at the other house, therefore I had not to manoeuvre away from her — and as to anybody else, I do not care.” In her next letter, Jane warned her niece to “write something that may do to be read or told”. Motherless Fanny wanted her aunt to make up her mind for her, but Jane Austen had too much sense for that. “You frighten me out of my wits by your reference. Your affection gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion. Your own feelings and none but your own, should determine such an important point.” She urged Fanny not to engage herself. “I should not be afraid of your marrying him,” she said wisely. “With all his worth, you would soon love him enough for the happiness of both; but I should dread the continuance of this sort of tacit engagement, with such an uncertainty as there is, of when it may be completed — Years may pass, before he is independent —You like him well enough to marry, but not well enough to wait ... nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love, bound to one, and preferring another.” Here speaks the voice of wisdom.

  Fanny chose the path of caution. John Plumtre survived his disappointment, married someone else in 1818, and was returned as Member of Parliament for East Kent in the Reform Parliament of 1832. The episode may have shaken Fanny more than she and her aunt expected. She remained single until 1820, when she married a cousin, Sir Edward Knatchbull, as his second wife. By then, there was no Aunt Jane to consult, so we do not know whether he was “the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to wor
th, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding”. Probably not. Fanny was twenty-seven by then, and Sir Edward thirty-nine.

  Meanwhile, the other grown-up niece, James’s Anna, married her Ben Lefroy at last that November in a quiet winter wedding described later by her half-sister, Caroline. Though Chawton was only sixteen miles from Steventon, and Frank was staying at the Great House, the Austen ladies did not go to the wedding, but Jane visited Henry in Hans Place later that month and went to call on the young couple, who were living at Hendon. Her second letter of advice to Fanny was written from Henry’s house and mentioned the visit. Anna had bought herself an unexpected purple pelisse and meant to buy a piano, which had shocked an aunt hardened to doing everything in public. “I suspect nothing worse than its being got in secret and not owned to anybody — She is capable of that, you know.” This oddly sharp note suggests that something went wrong between Anna and her aunt and friendly critic that autumn. Perhaps it was simply that this was the first marriage to take place in the next generation of Austens, and came as an inevitable shock to the confirmed maiden aunt, but there was probably more to it. Anna was not an easy character, and the circumstances of her engagement had not been easy either.

  After the first visit, Anna invited her aunt to come back and stay for a night, but this was declined in a civil bread-and-butter note. “We all came away very much pleased with our visit I assure you.” Edward was hopeful that Mr. Baverstock’s lawsuit was to be settled, and Jane was sorry not to have a chance to see a letter Anna had had from a cousin. “I like first cousins to be first cousins, and interested about each other. They are but one remove from brother and sister.” The relationship of brother and sister, or sister and sister, was, for Jane Austen, perhaps the deepest of all. She had celebrated it, in Mansfield Park, in the happy reunion of Fanny and William Price. “Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.” They never were among the Austens. The attachments that were outlived seem to have been those between children and parents.

  On this visit, Jane was exerting herself to make friends with Henry’s “Hanwell favourite”, Eliza Moore, and her sister. “At my time of life,” she confessed to Fanny, “it is uphill work to be talking to those whom one knows so little.” And, of Eliza, “We shall not have two ideas in common. She is young, pretty, chattering, and thinking chiefly (I presume) of dress, company, and admiration.”

  It was at about this time in Jane Austen’s life that Miss Mitford quoted that famous remark of her mother’s about the husband-hunting butterfly in a letter and went on to say:

  A friend of mine who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular precise, taciturn piece of “single blessedness” that ever existed, and that, till Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin, upright piece of wood or iron that fills the corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now: she is still a poker — but a poker of whom everyone is afraid. It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is rather formidable ... A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk, is terrific indeed!

  Two things must be remembered in connection with this portrait of the author as a fierce spinster. One is that the source quoted was a connection of the Mr. Baverstock who was suing Edward for his Hampshire estates, the other, and more important, is that Jane Austen was shy. She never wanted to be lionised, and even after Henry had betrayed the secret of her authorship, she would not be drawn into the kind of social life that would have been open to the author of Pride and Prejudice. She refused a chance to meet Madame de Stael, though she had read and enjoyed her books, and it is more than probable that Miss Mitford’s acquaintance had made some unfortunate attempt at “drawing out” the new lion and had been snubbed with the quiet ruthlessness of which one can imagine the author of Mansfield Park capable.

  In the family, it was different. Anna Austen remembered joking so much with her Aunt Jane over their work that Cassandra finally, with streaming eyes, begged them to stop, but she also remembered that when Aunt Jane was grave, she was very grave indeed, graver even than Aunt Cassandra. These are the two sides of the same picture. Like Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen allowed herself to be diverted by “follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies”, and laughed at them whenever she could. Laughter, and its sharper cousin, irony, were Jane Austen’s defence against the pressures of society, as Marvin Mudrick has pointed out in Jane Austen. Irony as Defense and Discovery. But true laughter and true irony both need a moral basis, and when this was threatened, Jane Austen stopped laughing. Then she was grave, graver even than Aunt Cassandra. Social pretentiousness, like everything else that rang false, might well have turned her into that “poker of whom everyone is afraid”.

  Lion or no, Miss Jane Austen, the author, was having a rather frustrating time that autumn. The small edition of Mansfield Park (probably only fifteen hundred copies) was sold out, she told Fanny, but it was doubtful whether she and Egerton would “hazard a second edition ... People are more ready to borrow and praise, than to buy — which I cannot wonder at — but though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls pewter too.” She and Henry had a final meeting with Egerton, but it proved unsatisfactory. The second edition of Mansfield Park was brought out, at last, in 1816 by the famous publisher Murray, to whom Jane Austen moved after considerable negotiation in the course of the next year. For the moment, she had a right to be discouraged, and it seems to have affected the progress of Emma. Writing once more to Anna about her novel she congratulated her on getting on so fast. “I wish other people of my acquaintance could compose as rapidly.”

  There is a happy tone in this letter which suggests that whatever the trouble had been between Anna and her aunt, it was over. “St. Julian’s history was quite a surprise to me,” said Jane. “You had not very long known it yourself I suspect — but I have no objection to make to the circumstance — it is very well told — and his having been in love with the aunt, gives Cecilia an additional interest with him. I like the idea — a very proper compliment to an aunt! — I rather imagine indeed that nieces are seldom chosen but in compliment to some aunt or other. I dare say Ben was in love with me once, and would never have thought of you if he had not supposed me dead of a scarlet fever.” This is Austen-nonsense at its happiest. Jane Austen was accommodating herself to the new position of senior aunt, as well as to the vagaries of her married niece.

  14

  Jane Austen may have been momentarily discouraged, in the autumn of 1814, about her progress with Emma, but Cassandra’s dates show that it was, in fact, written more quickly than any of her previous books. Begun in January 1814, it was finished in March 1815, and published that December. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, of course, had been revised and revised again over the years, while Mansfield Park had been begun about February 1811, and finished in the summer of 1813. Even then it had not been published until the following May.

  With Emma, Jane Austen seems to have taken a great step forward in her confidence as a writer. It is clear from her letters that she had been thinking about it as far back as least as the autumn of 1813, and probably earlier. Her usual habit, as David Rhydderch has pointed out in Jane Austen: Her Life and Art, was to work on three books at once. “Having milled one work, she begins another during the process of refining a second. The drudgery of correcting one, and ironing the other, was relieved by creating a third.” He quotes Emma as the great exception to this, but it seems reasonable to assume that she was already thinking about it while she finished Mansfield Park in the spring and summer of 1813, and dur
ing that autumn. Once one is used to have a set of fictional characters always at the back of one’s mind, to be taken up and thought about when the opportunity offers, it is hard to do without them, and Jane Austen would have needed the private half of her double life during the busy summer months at Chawton and the last long autumn visit to Godmersham. As with Mansfield Park, she began the actual writing of Emma in the quiet of winter, but Emma, her most perfect, if not necessarily her most likeable book, reads as if it had been well and truly planned in advance.

  Unfortunately, there are no letters for 1815 until September, and the only reference to the composition of Emma is that one deprecatory one to Anna, “I wish other people of my acquaintance could compose as rapidly.” Lacking letters for that eventful spring and summer of 1815, we do not know how the Austen ladies bore the anxiety of the new war that followed Napoleon’s escape from Elba. The occupants of the house on the busy Southampton road must have been intensely aware of the build-up of men and material in Flanders. Charles was on active service in the Mediterranean, where Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat had broken faith with the Allies, who had confirmed him in his position as King of Naples. Charles came through the resultant hostilities unscathed, and was able to write to Jane in May 1815 from Palermo that he had met a young man called Fox, who said that “nothing had come out for years to be compared with Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility ... That you may not be too much elated at this morsel of praise, I shall add that he did not appear to like Mansfield Park so well as the two first, in which, however, I believe he is singular.” The young man in question was Charles James Fox’s nephew, and son of Lord Holland, whose wife used to read Jane Austen’s novels aloud to her husband when his gout was bad.