Meanwhile, Anna Lefroy and her husband had moved to a house called Wyards, within walking distance of Chawton, and in September Jane wrote to change the arrangements for a visit to her. Charles’s motherless eldest daughter Cassy was living at Chawton at the time, and, given a choice between going to the Alton fair or going to Wyards, she had “preferred the former, which we trust will not greatly affront you — if it does, you may hope that some little Anna hereafter may revenge the insult by a similar preference of an Alton Fair to her Cousin Cassy.” Anna, in fact, bore her first child, a girl, that October.
Jane was off to London with Henry to conclude the negotiations for a change of publisher. She wrote Cassandra from Hans Place that, “Mr. Murray’s letter is come. He is a rogue of course, but a civil one. He offers £450 but wants to have the copyright of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility included. It will end in my publishing for myself I daresay.” Henry’s answer to this letter of Murray’s has been preserved. The style is characteristic.
Your official opinion of the merits of Emma is very valuable and satisfactory ... the quantum of your commendation rather exceeds than falls short of the author’s expectation and my own. The terms you offer are so very inferior to what we had expected that I am apprehensive of having made some great error in my arithmetical calculation ... the sum offered by you for the copyright of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma is not equal to the money which my sister has actually cleared by one very moderate edition of Mansfield Park — (you yourself expressed astonishment that so small an edition of such a work should have been sent into the world) — and a still smaller one of Sense and Sensibility.
Henry had to dictate this letter. He was suffering from what his sister described as “a bilious attack with fever ... He is calomeling and therefore in a way to be better and I hope may be well tomorrow.” But next day Jane changed her tune. “Henry’s illness is more serious than I expected.” She had sent for Mr. Haden, “the apothecary from the corner of Sloane Street”, who “calls it a general inflammation”. In accordance with the barbarous medical practice of the time, Haden had taken “twenty ounces of blood from Henry last night, and nearly as much more this morning, and expects to have to bleed him again tomorrow — but he assures me that he found him quite as much better today as he expected.”
Henry was an excellent patient, she said, and she was still hopeful of getting home soon. Meanwhile, she was busy cancelling engagements. She had put off Edward’s boys “till Friday. I have a strong idea of their uncle’s being well enough to like seeing them by that time.” She proved over-optimistic. Henry grew worse instead of better and Jane’s anxious letters brought James and Cassandra hurrying up from Hampshire, and Edward and Fanny from Godmersham. At the end of October, Jane was still nursing Henry and had felt it necessary to write a “preparatory letter” to the Leigh Perrots at Scarlets. She mentioned this to her ten-year-old niece Caroline. James’s younger daughter, who was staying at Chawton, had started writing in her turn, and had, inevitably, sent the manuscript to her aunt. Busy nursing her brother, Jane had “not yet felt quite equal to taking up your manuscript”, and hoped her “detaining it so long will be no inconvenience”. She congratulated Caroline (Anna Lefroy’s half-sister) on having become an aunt. “I have always maintained the importance of aunts as much as possible, and I am sure of your doing the same now.” She signed herself, “Believe me my dear Sister-Aunt, Yours affectionately J. Austen.” It was almost a prophecy. Caroline, the most intelligent of the nieces, lived and died a spinster like her Sister-Aunt.
Terms for Emma had been agreed with Murray at last. Murray’s friend and adviser, William Gifford, had been full of praise both for Pride and Prejudice and for Emma. “I have for the first time looked into Pride and Prejudice and it is really a very pretty thing. No dark passages; no secret chambers; no wind-howlings in long galleries; no drops of blood upon a rusty dagger — things that should now be left to ladies’ maids and sentimental washerwomen.” And, “Of Emma, I have nothing but good to say. I was sure of the writer before you mentioned her.” Praise from Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, was praise indeed. What is surprising is that Murray’s reaction was so cautious, but he may well have been influenced by the lack of critical reaction to Mansfield Park. And Jane Austen, preoccupied with Henry’s illness, was very likely glad to settle the matter by accepting his offer of publication on a commission basis. It was probably just as expensive, and just as understandable a mistake as her outright sale of Pride and Prejudice. With only ten per cent of the profits at stake, John Murray the second does not seem to have overexerted himself in publicising Emma. It is significant that Samuel Smiles’ Memoir of John Murray, with nearly two columns each in its index for Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, has just four references for Jane Austen.
On the other hand, Jane Austen, like his other authors, found John Murray an agreeable publisher to deal with. Gifford, pointing out that the manuscript of Emma, “though plainly written, has yet some, indeed many little omissions”, had offered to revise it. Jane Austen certainly refused this offer, and corrected her own proofs, complaining, as authors will, of the printer’s delays, but her letters to Murray himself are increasingly friendly. He lent her books, and gave her good advice; the pity of it is that it did not occur to him to give Emma the same kind of pre-publication publicity that he gave Childe Harold. But then, the cases were very different. Perhaps if Jane Austen had gone to him with Pride and Prejudice it would have been another story.
Meanwhile, a disconcerting thing happened to Jane Austen. Henry continued so ill that Mr. Haden’s ministrations had been supplemented by those of one of the Prince Regent’s physicians, probably Sir William Knighton, who soon discovered that the sister who was nursing his patient so devotedly was in fact Miss Austen, the author. The Prince Regent, he told her, was a great admirer of her novels and kept a set in every one of his residences. While Jane Austen was recovering from this tribute from the man of whose wife she had written, “Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a woman, and because I hate her husband,” a further surprise followed. She received a visit from the Prince Regent’s librarian, a pompous Mr. Clarke, who invited her to Carlton House, explaining (as the author of the Memoir put it) that he had “the Prince’s instructions to show her the library and other apartments, and to pay her every possible attention”. He sounds, at least in James Edward Austen-Leigh’s report, so like Mr. Collins, that Jane Austen must have felt that one of her characters had come disconcertingly to life.
Worse was to follow. In the course of the visit to Carlton House, which duly took place, Mr. Clarke intimated to Miss Austen that she was at liberty to dedicate her next novel to the Prince Regent. Jane Austen must have been appalled. It is hard to imagine a more unsuitable dedication for Emma. Caroline tells us that she had no idea of acting on the permission to dedicate until told by her friends that it was tantamount to a command. She then wrote a masterly little note to Mr. Clarke, asking “whether it is incumbent on me to show my sense of the honour, by inscribing the work now in the press to His Royal Highness; I should be equally concerned,” she went on, “to appear either presumptuous or ungrateful.”
Edward had taken Cassandra home to Chawton on Henry’s beginning to recover, and a letter to her provides a gloss to this. “I hope you have told Martha of my first resolution of letting nobody know that I might dedicate, &c for fear of being obliged to do it — and that she is thoroughly convinced of my being influenced now by nothing but the most mercenary motives.” Resigning herself to the inevitable, she used the dedication as a spur to Murray’s dilatory printers, and received “a fine compliment in return”.
She had also received Mr. Clarke’s reply by return. His letter settled the question of the dedication and went on to urge her to write a book about “an English clergyman ... of the present day, fond of and entirely engaged in literature, no man’s enemy but his own”, in short, himself. He received a more i
nteresting answer than he deserved. Jane Austen wrote to him early in December, when Emma was about to be published, the unavoidable dedication having been taken care of in an exchange of letters with Murray. She was suffering from an author’s inevitable qualms at such a time. “My greatest anxiety at present is that this fourth work should not disgrace what was good in the others ... I am very strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred Pride and Prejudice it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred Mansfield Park very inferior in good sense.” She went on, courteously but firmly, to declare herself incapable of writing the book he wanted about a clergyman. “A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Readers who take this claim seriously, do so at their peril.
Mr. Clarke was unsnubbable. Thanking her for the Prince Regent’s presentation copy of Emma, he returned to the attack. “Do let us have an English Clergyman after your fancy ... show dear madam what good would be done if tithes were taken away entirely, and describe him burying his own mother — as I did ... Carry your clergyman to sea as a friend of some distinguished naval character about a court ...” And so on. Jane Austen probably made a note for her Plan of a Novel, and returned to the serious business of nursing Henry back to health. An acute psychologist before the industry had acquired its technical terms, she recognised that anxiety about his bank was probably retarding his recovery. “I wonder that with such business to worry him, he can be getting better, but he certainly does gain strength.” 1815, with the war over at last, and the inevitable post-war depression setting in, was not a good year for banks. 1816 was to be a worse one.
Mr. Haden was still in devoted attendance, not only on his patient but on Jane and Fanny. He was on visiting terms now, and Jane wrote Cassandra that they were looking forward to a quiet evening with him and Henry’s partner, Mr. Tilson. Unfortunately a couple of ladies of their acquaintance offered themselves for tea. “Here is an end of our extreme felicity in our dinner guest — I am heartily sorry they are coming! It will be an evening spoilt to Fanny and me.” Jane Austen and Fanny Knight could recognise quality when they met it, even in an apothecary. Charles Thomas Haden was to introduce the stethoscope and was a well-known amateur of music. “I have been listening to dreadful insanity,” said Jane Austen. “It is Mr. Haden’s firm belief that a person not musical is fit for every sort of wickedness. I ventured to assert a little on the other side, but wished the cause in abler hands.” For once she had found someone outside the family to whom she could really talk. “Mr. Haden,” she reported after the dinner party, “brought good manners and clever conversation ...” She went on to describe “Fanny and Mr. Haden in two chairs (I believe at least they had two chairs) talking together uninterruptedly.” And then, a significant note, “Fanny has heard all that I have said to you about herself and Mr. H.”
Cassandra, in Hampshire, seems to have injected a note of caution in her answer to this letter, and her sister took her up on it. “You seem to be under a mistake as to Mr. H. — You call him an apothecary; he is no apothecary, he has never been an apothecary, there is not an apothecary in this neighbourhood — ... he is a Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature on two legs, something between a man and an angel — but without the least spice of an apothecary.” One can only wonder what really happened to that happy trio round the invalid’s bed. Lord Brabourne quotes from his mother’s diary: “Mr. Haden, a delightful, clever, musical Haden, comes every evening, and is agreeable.” And that is the end of Mr. Haden, except that he must have married soon afterwards, for his son, later a prominent doctor and artist, and ultimately Sir Francis Seymour Haden, was born in 1818.
Edward had been staying in Hampshire while his daughter kept her aunt company in Hans Place, but perhaps some warning from Cassandra brought him to town to take Fanny home to Godmersham on December 8th. Henry was much better by now, but old Mrs. Austen was unwell. “I am sorry my mother has been suffering,” Jane wrote, “and am afraid this exquisite weather is too good to agree with her! I enjoy it all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally.” But in fact, she had overtired herself nursing her brother, and, whatever she says, it is hard to imagine him as the easiest of invalids. Altogether, what with Henry’s illness, the Prince Regent and Mr. Clarke, and, perhaps most tiring of all, Fanny and Mr. Haden, this must have been an exhausting winter. She actually felt unwell enough in the course of it to consult a doctor, but we do not know who, or what he said.
Jane had been to see Charles’s younger, motherless daughters, who were with their Aunt Harriet (later his second wife) in Keppel Street, and sent messages to their sister Cassy, at Chawton. She was doing errands as usual, “encountering the miseries of Grafton House to get a purple frock for Eleanor Bridges”. But she still found time to thank Caroline Austen for another instalment of her book. “I wish I could finish stories as fast as you can.” And, in a short, straight note, returning some books, she said goodbye to “our precious” Mr. Haden. “As we were out ourselves yesterday evening we were glad to find you had not called — but shall depend upon your giving us some part of this evening — I leave town early on Saturday, and must say ‘goodbye’ to you.” Fanny was gone, and Jane was going. Whatever had happened, was over.
Emma was announced for publication in December 1815, but no reviews of it appeared until the following spring and summer. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had been reviewed sooner than this, and the delay must have been maddening for an author still smarting under the critics’ total silence about Mansfield Park. And when they came, the reviews were on the tepid side. The book was described as “harmless amusement” by the Monthly Review, while the British Critic’s reviewer said that, “It rarely happens that in a production of this nature we have so little to find fault with.” The Gentleman’s Magazine was equally lukewarm. “If Emma be not allowed to rank in the very highest class of modern novels, it certainly may claim at least a distinguished degree of eminence in that species of composition. It is amusing, if not instructive; and has no tendency to deteriorate the heart.”
But there was comfort in the Quarterly Review, which was published by Murray himself. He had written to Sir Walter Scott, “Have you any fancy to dash off an article on Emma? It wants incident and romance does it not?” Perhaps Murray thought less highly of Emma than Gifford. At least Scott obliged with an unsigned review which appeared in the issue dated October 1815, but only, in fact, published the following March. He began with a general discussion of the value of novels in a passage which may or may not have antedated Jane Austen’s own defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey. He went on to speak favourably of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and then turned to describe Emma as “a story which we pursue with more pleasure, if not with deep interest, and which perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity.” He congratulated the author on “the force of a narrative conducted with much neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect.” But, alas for Miss Bates, he found that the comic characters became tedious. He was to improve, later, on this rather lukewarm praise. Writing his diary in March of 1826, he said that Jane Austen “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.” But by then she had been dead nine years.
On April 1st, 1816, Jane Austen returned the copy of the Quarterly Review that Murray had lent her, “with many thanks. The authoress of Emma has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it,
except in the total omission of Mansfield Park. I cannot but be sorry that so clever a man as the reviewer of Emma should consider it as unworthy of being noticed. You will be pleased to hear that I have received the Prince’s thanks for the handsome copy I sent him of Emma. Whatever he may think of my share of the work, yours seems to have been quite right.”
In fact, the reception of Emma was disappointing, like that of Mansfield Park, and the reason is not far to seek. In these two books, Jane Austen had made the mistake so many authors do. After acquiring a public for her light-hearted early works, she changed her tune and wrote two totally adult books. And, by sheer bad luck, the publication of the early novels had been so long delayed that Mansfield Park and Emma followed as if in natural and immediate succession. No wonder if her readers were surprised. It had been easy to enjoy the surface brilliance and charm, particularly of Pride and Prejudice, without taking too much notice of the low, enduring moral note against which the comedy beats out its happy tune. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice can, and often have, been treated simply as romantic comedies, and for one reviewer who compares Elizabeth Bennet to Shakespeare’s Beatrice there are always half a dozen to accuse Jane Austen of celebrating nothing better than the “husband hunt”. Mansfield Park, inevitably, confounds them. Fanny Price can be accused of many things, but not of hunting husbands. If she had been on the hunt, she would have married Henry Crawford. The hunting is left to Mary Crawford and the Bertram girls, and very unsuccessful they are at it.
In Emma, the whole situation has been turned, ironically, upside-down. Emma hunts husbands — for other people, and nearly destroys her own happiness in the process. The author of the Memoir quotes Jane Austen as describing Emma as a “heroine whom no one but myself will much like”, and, in fact, certainly in the first half of the book, one rather suspects that even Jane Austen does not much like her. She may be “my Emma” to Mrs. Weston, but she is not to Jane Austen, as Fanny Price was “my Fanny” and Elinor Dashwood “my Elinor”. If Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most moral book, Emma is her least feminine one, and it is not surprising that it is often preferred by men. In Beyond Culture, Lionel Trilling remarks, with a touch of surprise, that Emma has “a moral life as a man has a moral life”. Her charm, he says, is based on self-love, and “women in fiction only rarely have the peculiar reality of the moral life that self-love bestows. Most commonly they exist in a moonlike way, shining by the reflected moral light of men.” As so often when Jane Austen is the subject, the criticism tells us at least as much about the critic as about the book, but it is none the less perceptive for that. In The Watsons, Jane Austen had tried a serious approach to the problem of the husband hunt and had apparently recognised defeat. In Emma she turns it into high, ironic comedy. The book might easily have been called Match-making, with even Mr. Knightley taking part in the game, when he sends Robert Martin to London after his Harriet. There is not much romance about Emma. The romantic, or Cinderella theme has been relegated to a couple of sub-plots, where Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax work out their destinies as best they may, with a maximum of interference from a heroine with whom her creator refuses to identify herself. Here Lionel Trilling goes wide of the mark. It has been thought, he says, that in the portrait of Emma there is “an air of confession”, that in drawing her, Jane Austen was taking account of something offensive that she and others had observed in her own earlier manner and conduct.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 21