It is an extraordinary suggestion. Emma is practically everything that Jane Austen was not. Where Jane Austen was poor, shy, and one of eight, Emma is rich, spoiled, over-confident and to all intents and purposes an only child. Most important of all, where Jane Austen was a realist, Emma is a snob, and a stupid one at that. Where Jane Austen could recognise quality in Mr. Haden, or Elizabeth Bennet bad manners in Lady Catherine, Emma’s criteria are purely social. As a result, she is incorrigibly, almost wilfully wrong in her judgments about people, and Jane Austen appears to take pleasure in showing her up over this, as when she wonders whether she will condescend to accept an invitation from the Coles, and is then taken aback when the invitation does not arrive. The real triumph of the book is that Jane Austen has managed to make this unpromising heroine sympathetic, not only to most men, who, as she herself has said, like a woman to be a bit of a fool, but to many women. This is largely because Emma is prepared to learn by experience, when once it has hit her hard enough. Like Marianne Dashwood before her, she ends by reversing all her own first principles, and it is a pleasure to watch her.
As rich and subtle as Mansfield Park, Emma has a lightness of tone that is notably absent from the story of Fanny Price. This is Jane Austen’s purest and driest comedy. Where Mansfield Park dealt in adultery, elopement and corruption, the most wicked thing that happens in Emma is its heroine’s own rudeness to Miss Bates at the famous picnic on Box Hill. It is a measure of the quality of the book that this one flippant, cruel remark carries a more convincing moral load than any of Maria or Julia Bertram’s misbehaviour. It is the crucial point of the book, the moment when Emma turns her clear sight into herself for the first time. Jane Austen’s books are always, to some extent, concerned with the problem of learning by painful experience, but in Emma this is the dominant theme, and the extraordinary richness of the book is due to the fact that so many of the characters are capable of doing so. Even Mr. Knightley, like Darcy before him, must learn to be teased by his wife. Emma learns to know herself, and the Emma she learns to know is delightful.
The dialogue in Emma is some of the best Jane Austen wrote, which means it is some of the best in the English language, with even the breathless Miss Bates contributing vitally to the progress of the narrative. Altogether it is a brilliant book, technically an immense advance over Pride and Prejudice, and if one goes obstinately on preferring Pride and Prejudice, it is probably because the latter still has the glow of youth upon it. And yet, in one of those impossible desert island situations, I think, for one’s single book, one would be wise to choose Mansfield Park or Emma rather even than Pride and Prejudice. “Wisdom is better than wit,” as Jane Austen told Fanny, “and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” People who begin by loving Pride and Prejudice, may end by rereading the later novels more often.
15
While Jane Austen was finishing Emma, that eventful spring of 1815, she must also, as usual, have been busy planning her next book. Cassandra’s note tells us that Persuasion was begun that summer, but it must have been laid aside in the autumn when Henry became ill. No doubt, Jane Austen made a new start on it when she got home at last in December; though once again she must have been interrupted by a visit she and Cassandra paid, at the turn of the year, to their old friends Mrs. Heathcote and her sister Miss Bigg, who were now settled at Winchester. Mrs. Heathcote’s clergyman husband had died in 1802, and she and her sister had set up house in the Close at Winchester some time in 1814.
Jane and Cassandra went on from there to pay a short visit to the James Austens at Steventon, and it may well be from this time that some of Caroline Austen’s memories of her aunt can be dated. Was it on this visit that she was told the ravishing stories she remembered about fairies who all had characters of their own? And did she keep “creeping up” to her aunt, until her mother warned her off? It seems likely. Before Jane Austen became, even to her quiet extent, what she called “a wild beast”, it is doubtful if it would have occurred to Mrs. James Austen that her child’s attentions could be any less welcome than the little Middletons’ were to the Miss Steeles.
In fact, Jane Austen obviously welcomed eleven-year-old Caroline’s affection. “She seemed to love you, and you loved her naturally in return,” said Caroline. Several letters to her survive from this period, and one of them is worth quoting whole. “I wish I could finish stories as fast as you can — I am much obliged to you for the sight of Olivia, and think you have done for her very well; but the good for nothing father, who was the real author of all her faults and sufferings, should not escape unpunished. I hope he hung himself, or took the surname of Bone or underwent some direful penance or other.” The secret of Jane Austen’s success with children was simple: she treated them as equals. Another letter to Caroline, dated in March, 1816, carries on a lively discussion of Olympe et Theophile by Madame de Genlis. “You are quite my own niece in your feelings towards Madame de Genlis ... It really is too bad! — Not allowing them to be happy together, when they are married.”
If Jane Austen had hoped to have silenced Mr. Clarke with her last letter, she had been mistaken. The egregious clergyman wrote to her again that March. He had just been appointed chaplain and secretary to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who had arrived in England to marry the Prince Regent’s heir, Princess Charlotte. Mr. Clarke thought that Jane Austen might like to dedicate her next book to Prince Leopold, and went on to say that, “Any historical romance, illustrative of the august house of Coburg, would just now be very interesting.”
He received the answer he deserved. After the usual courtesies, Jane Austen went roundly to work with him.
I am fully sensible, [she said] that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Coburg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down and write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
Mansfield Park and Emma may not have been received with the acclaim they deserved, but Jane Austen had too much sense to let this influence her into a new start so drastic as the one Mr. Clarke suggested. On the other hand, Persuasion does, to an extent, hark back to the style of the earlier novels. In it, as in her two first published books, the love story is the dominant theme, with the moral issues relegated to the background. But whether this is due to a change in herself, or to her awareness of a falling off of enthusiasm in her audience, there is no way of knowing.
Some time in 1816 Henry bought back the long-lost Susan from Crosby for the ten pounds he had paid for it, and then had the pleasure of telling the dilatory publisher that the book he had neglected was by the author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It is significant that he chose to mention those two, rather than the more recently published Mansfield Park and Emma. This transaction probably took place in the early months of 1816, for in March disaster struck Henry. Jane had obviously been anxious about his affairs in the autumn when she was in Hans Place nursing him. It had been a bad time for him to be ill. Waterloo had brought both peace and financial crisis to the exhausted country. Hardest hit, as always, were the small men, whether in society or in business. A dramatic fall in the price of corn ruined small farmers and country banks alike, and in March the Alton bank with which Henry’s London one had connections failed and dragged Austen, Maunde and Tilson down with it. Henry’s bankruptcy was a family disaster. Edward Knight and James Leigh Perrot, who had stood sureties for twenty thousand and ten thousand pounds respectively when Henry became Receiver-General of Taxes for Oxfordshire, lost their money. Edward took it like the Austen and the gen
tleman he was, but James Leigh Perrot undoubtedly took it hard. Even Jane lost thirteen pounds, part of the profits from the first edition of Mansfield Park, which had been banked in Henrietta Street. Writing to thank Murray for the loan of the Quarterly Review with Scott’s anonymous piece in it, she makes her only reference to Henry’s disaster. “In consequence of the late event in Henrietta Street, I must request that if you should at any time have anything to communicate by letter, you will be so good as to write by the post, directing to me (Miss J. Austen), Chawton, near Alton: and that for anything of a larger bulk, you will add to the same direction, by Collier’s Southampton coach.” It was a far cry from the pseudonymous Mrs. Ashton Dennis.
In April, Miss Elizabeth Leigh, Thomas Leigh’s sister and Cassandra’s godmother, died. “We all feel that we have lost a most valued old friend,” wrote Jane to Caroline, but added philosophically, “The death of a person at her advanced age, so fit to die and by her own feelings so ready to die, is not to be regretted.” Despite the inevitable mourning, family visiting went on as usual. Henry had been down at Godmersham, doubtless being comforted in his bankruptcy by the brother whose twenty thousand pounds he had lost. And at the beginning of May, Edward, Fanny, and a little later, her brother Edward Knight junior were all coming to Chawton. Jane wanted to arrange a visit from James’s Caroline to her cousin Cassy, who was with them as usual, but “we must wash before the Godmersham party come”, so the visit would have to be a short one. Those were the days of the great spring wash.
It had been a long, hard winter. Henry’s illness and bankruptcy had told on Jane, and so must anxiety about their “own particular brother” Charles, whose ship H.M.S. Phoenix was wrecked in a gale off Smyrna that February. No blame attached to him, but the episode must have been at once a setback to his career and a source of long worry to his family. At all events, it was at this time, according to the authors of the Life, that Jane’s health began to fail, although she had already made at least one visit to a London physician when she was with Henry that winter. The first signs of trouble were probably digestive (she was later to speak of “bile” as the source of her complaint) and her ill health was probably the reason for a three-week visit she and Cassandra paid to Cheltenham in May. Cheltenham, like Bath, was known for its medicinal waters. Henry had been going there, no doubt for an occasional “cure”, since as early as 1808. And unlike Bath, Cheltenham had no old unhappy associations, and, perhaps more important, no risk of meeting irate Leigh Perrots.
On the way back from Cheltenham the sisters visited their old friends the Fowles at Kintbury, who noticed a change in Jane. She was no longer the vigorous woman who loved to walk, and who could enjoy good weather “all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally”. More disturbing still, the Fowles noticed that Jane went about paying visits to her favourite haunts, as if for the last time. But this may well have been wisdom after the event.
Cassandra and Jane visited Steventon on the way home, which was never restful, and even at Chawton life must have been busier than usual. Frank and his wife Mary came to stay, with their two daughters, Cassy and Mary Jane, and when they returned to London they took Cassy, Cassandra senior and Martha with them, so that Jane was left alone to look after her mother and little Mary Jane, who was just nine. James’s wife, the other Mary, had been ill, and old Mrs. Austen was doubtless “not quite well”, as usual. And to make matters worse, that was a terrible summer. Writing to James’s son Edward, Jane Austen described meeting a neighbour. “I talked of its being bad weather for the hay — and he returned me the comfort of its being much worse for the wheat.” She could still manage the old light note for the young. Edward was just home from Winchester and she teased him a little about this, and about his schoolmates whom they had watched passing their window. “We saw a countless number of postchaises full of boys pass by yesterday morning — full of future heroes, legislators, fools, and villains.” Probably because James’s Mary was still unwell, Edward and his father came to stay at Chawton a few days later, and Jane wrote to Edward’s sister Caroline that his visit “has been a great pleasure to us. He has not lost one good quality or good look and is only altered in being improved by being some months older than when we saw him last. He is getting very near our own age, for we do not grow older of course.”
Which probably meant that at forty she was feeling her age, and the encroaching symptoms of the disease that would kill her. In an article for the British Medical Journal of July 1964, Doctor (now Sir) Zachary Cope, analysed Jane Austen’s own description of her symptoms and proved, conclusively in my view, that she died of an illness that had not then been identified, Addison’s disease of the adrenal bodies. He attributes the beginning of the illness to the shock of Henry’s bankruptcy, but no doubt the long anxiety of the months that led up to it played its part too, as well as worry over Charles. It is equally sad to think that Jane’s favourite brother’s disaster was the beginning of her own, and to remember that these days her illness could probably be kept under control by hormone injections.
In the spring and summer of 1816, it seems likely that Jane was beginning to feel rather less well than usual, suffering perhaps from fits of fatigue and faintness, and digestive upsets. She doubtless dosed herself in the same practical spirit with which she had dosed her mother for so long, and went on coping with life as it came. She had both Persuasion and Susan to work on, and must have returned to her old habit of polishing one book while she wrote another. An anonymous novel called Susan had come out while Jane Austen’s book lay dormant with Crosby, so now her heroine was being turned into Catherine Morland while she finished Persuasion.
Revising Susan for the third time, Jane Austen seems to have worked with a light hand. A close revision would undoubtedly have removed that old family joke about Mr. Morland, “a very respectable man, though his name was Richard”. Tired, ailing and busy, Jane Austen probably went through her old book quite fast, changing Susan to Catherine throughout, sighing and smiling over the dated references to Mrs. Radcliffe and the Mysteries of Udolpho, and adding a note for the reader explaining what had happened to the book and why parts of it had been made “comparatively obsolete” by the passage of thirteen years. Jane Austen must by this time have been enough of a professional to recognise the dangers of too heavy a revision of this light-hearted early work, so close in spirit to the Juvenilia.
The most significant bit of revision, in my view, is that of the famous defence of the novel, in Chapter Five:
Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.
This is no unpublished novelist speaking. This is the voice of the author of Mansfield Park and of Emma, and it tells us a painful deal of how she felt about the reception of her masterpieces. Emma had come out in December 1815, and the second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816, so it must have been towards the end of the year, or the beginning of 1817, that she learned that her profit on Emma had been almost wiped out by the loss on the second edition of Mansfield Park. She actually received the balance of £38 18s. due to her in February 1817. There are no references to what must have been a bitter disappointment in her surviving letters or in the family’s records, but her own financial blow must have been doubly painful in the light of Henry’s bankruptcy. The two shocks together may well have combined to contribute to the insidious onset of her last illness. It may not only have been Keats who felt that his “name was writ
in water”.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 22