This must, though she conceals it admirably in the rest of the letter, have been one of the times of low spirits described in the Memoir, and doubtless due to her illness. Her description of her method of work has been quoted over and over again by her critics, and I suppose it is no more ironic that this serious bit of self depreciation should be taken au pied de la lettre than that her comic ones were. If Jane Austen was a miniaturist, then the whole world was her background. Her little bit (two inches wide) of ivory is her microcosm, which predicates the rest of the universe. And I am sure that, except in moments of ill health and discouragement, she knew this. She was not, it is true, to know that critics to come would discuss in all earnestness whether she owed the greater debt to Plato or Aristotle, to Dr. Johnson or Lord Shaftesbury. If she could have known, she would probably have dissolved into one of her fits of delighted laughter. But, “the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress” was artist enough to recognise her own quality, so long as she had the strength to function as artist and critic.
There must have been a remission of her illness about this time, perhaps when the house became quieter after the departure of Charles and Henry. By January 1817, she had awakened once again “to more cheerful views and brighter inspirations”. The sense of power must have revived; and imagination resumed its course. She started a new book that was to be totally unlike the others. She had probably been discussing her plans for it with Cassandra for some time, but no doubt the associations of this book, unfinished because of her sister’s death, were too painful for Cassandra to give any clue as to what she had planned for it. All we have is eleven short chapters, but they are enough to show that Persuasion had ended the first stage of Jane Austen’s literary career. It was the last of her romantic comedies, and had already begun to show a sea-change. Now the keen, cold intelligence that had created Sir Walter Elliot and his odious daughter Elizabeth would turn more entirely to social satire. In her art, as in her life, Jane Austen had always spoken with two voices, but so far it had been possible for romantically-minded readers to ignore the bass note of irony, concentrating on the gay treble of the heroine’s adventures. This would, from the evidence of the eleven existing chapters, have been impossible with Sanditon. If completed, it would probably have provided the same kind of shock to devoted readers that an addict of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies might feel on turning from As you Like It to All’s Well that Ends Well.
Thanking the Countess of Morley for a letter of congratulation on Emma, Jane Austen had written, in December 1815, that it encouraged her to “believe that I have not yet — as every writer of fancy does sooner or later — overwritten myself”. She was writing Persuasion at the time, and had perhaps already decided that it was to be her last romantic comedy. Now, at forty-one, she must have decided it was time to break entirely new ground. In the new book she bravely started in January 1817 everything was to be different. The opening, with a carriage accident in the first sentence, is as unlike as possible to her usual leisured run-in, while Mr. Parker, one of the characters to be satirised, holds the field for the whole of the first chapter. The heroine (or one of them) is not introduced until the end of the second chapter, by which time the tone of dry comedy is well established. Charlotte Heywood was presumably to share the honours as heroine with Clara Brereton, who is not introduced until Chapter Six, when Charlotte (already established as the intelligent observer who sees most of the game) instantly recognises her as “a complete heroine”.
There was to be a hero to match. Sir Edward Denham, like Catherine Morland before him, has over-indulged himself in romantic fiction, and feels in honour (or dishonour) bound to seduce Clara Brereton, who is in the classic position of penniless dependant. Jane Austen lets us see him considering the possibilities of “the neighbourhood of Tombuctoo” as the scene of his beloved’s seduction, and deciding, regretfully, that economy indicates that he must “prefer the quietest sort of ruin and disgrace for the object of his affections, to the more renowned”. Jane Austen was trying her hand here, for almost the first time, at extensive inner study of her male figures, and a title for the book, which she had discussed with Cassandra, is surely significant in this context. She had considered calling it The Brothers, in honour of the three Parkers: Mr. Parker, of the carriage accident and the absurd passion for sea-air; his gluttonous brother Arthur, who has such a neat hand with a slice of toast; and Sidney, the third, presumably Charlotte’s hero, who only makes his appearance in the last chapter Jane Austen wrote.
Speculation is idle, but attractive. Was the plot to contain two ruins, or near ruins, those of Clara Brereton, and of Sanditon itself, the seaside resort into which Mr. Parker had put all his money? Sanditon, certainly, was to play an infinitely more important part in the story that the setting ever had before in Jane Austen’s novels. If one scene tends to leap to the mind as crucial for most of the other books — Box Hill for Emma, Lyme Regis for Persuasion, Sotherton for Mansfield Park — in Sanditon the place dominates the book. It is lovingly described, in the quick, allusive style Jane Austen had allowed herself at times before, as in Mrs. Elton’s famous monologue among the strawberries at Donwell. But if speculation about plot is idle, discussion of style in this much altered first draft is almost absurd. If she had lived, she would undoubtedly have changed so much ...
Among other things, I imagine she would have given a fairly drastic pruning to the whole episode of Mr. Parker’s valetudinarian and busy sisters, but how characteristic of Jane Austen to have written, in pencil, in discomfort, during her last illness, about so absurd a pair of hypochondriacs. She had laughed all her life. Now, gallantly, was she laughing at death? On March 17th, she put down her pen on a characteristic note of humour, and never picked it up again. But enough of Sanditon (or The Brothers) remains to suggest that its completion might have sadly disconcerted the faithful band of readers who had always loved Pride and Prejudice best. With the one desolating exception of Jane, the Austens were a long-lived family. If she had lived, might she not have developed into a formidable, Victorian Ivy Compton-Burnett?
From January 17th to March 17th, Jane Austen went on indomitably working away at Sanditon in pencil if necessary; reclining, when her discomfort grew too great, on a mock sofa made of three chairs, because, as she quietly explained to a niece, if she had used the one real sofa her mother might not have liked to. Jane maintained, of course, that her three chairs were just as comfortable, and nobody thought to buy a second sofa. But this was very likely as much Jane Austen’s fault as anyone’s. She would go on laughing to the end, and she would think of everyone else but herself. Writing to Caroline in January 1817, she was preoccupied as always with language. “Your Anne is dreadful. But nothing offends me so much as the absurdity of not being able to pronounce the word shift. I could forgive her any follies in English, rather than the mock modesty of that French word.” Uncle Charles, meanwhile, “has a sad turn for being unwell”, but, “I feel myself getting stronger than I was half a year ago and can so perfectly well walk to Alton, or back again, without the slightest fatigue that I hope to be able to do both when summer comes.” She had been visiting the Frank Austens at Alton, “and though the children are sometimes very noisy and not under such order as they ought and easily might, I cannot help liking them and even loving them, which I hope may be not wholly inexcusable in their and your affectionate aunt.” Life at the Frank Austens’ sounds rather like life at the Musgroves’.
Though Caroline was only sixteen miles away at Steventon, it was not easy for her and her aunt to meet, which is sad, as by now Jane Austen seems to have recognised a true kinswoman in the eleven-year-old daughter of her least favourite sister-in-law. “The pianoforte often talks of you,” she says in a postscript to this last letter, “in various keys, tunes, and expressions I allow — but be it lesson or country dance, sonata or waltz, you are really its constant theme. I wish you could come and see us, as easily as Edward can.” For Edward, the sixteen mile
s between Steventon and Chawton were a morning’s ride; for his little sister, they were an impossible barrier, or, if she went, it must be with the father and mother who brought out the best, one suspects, neither in her nor in her aunt.
That January, Jane Austen wrote a long letter to her old friend Alethea Bigg, who was staying with her sister and brother-in-law, the Hills, in Streatham. It is a sad letter, just because Jane wrote so confidently about her health: “I have certainly gained strength through the winter and am not far from being well; and I think I understand my own case now so much better than I did, as to be able by care to keep off any serious return of illness. I am more and more convinced that bile is at the bottom of all I have suffered, which makes it easy to know how to treat myself.” In fact, the weakness and the digestive upsets were continuing, and as she had cosseted her brothers through very similar afflictions at various times in their lives, it was both reasonable and characteristic to take her own symptoms lightly.
The other family news was good. James’s Edward remained a favourite, and James, who seems to have been unwell too, was better. His daughter Anna Lefroy, who had borne two children in two years, was looking better than since her marriage. And Henry was now curate of Bentley, near Alton, and was expected at Chawton “very soon, perhaps in time to assist Mr. Papillon on Sunday. I shall be very glad when the first hearing is over. It will be a nervous hour for our pew, though we hear that he acquits himself with as much ease and collectedness, as if he had been used to it all his life.” Henry was, at last, settled for life. He remarried in 1820, and continued as perpetual curate of Bentley until his death in 1850.
Mr. Hill’s nephew, the poet (and poet laureate) Southey had written a Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, and Jane told Alethea that the Austens had been reading it with “much approbation. Parts of it suit me better than much that he has written before.” A friend of Alethea’s was in France, and Jane hoped her letters from there were satisfactory. “They would not be satisfactory to me, I confess, unless they breathed a strong spirit of regret for not being in England.” Jane Austen had always been a passionate Englishwoman. The autumn before, commenting on one of the Lefroys’ return from France, she had written to Cassandra, “He is come back from France, thinking of the French as one could wish, disappointed in everything.”
A charming postscript to her letter to Alethea Bigg shows Jane Austen the housewife still, and still in charge of the wine. The wet summer had meant a shortage of honey for the home-made mead they drank at Chawton. Now, “The real object of this letter is to ask you for a receipt, but I thought it genteel not to let it appear early. We remember some excellent orange wine at Manydown, made from Seville oranges ... and should be very much obliged to you for the receipt, if you can command it within a few weeks.” Some housewives make marmalade with their Seville oranges after Christmas, but the Austens meant to make wine that year. The French wine that one drank in affluent Kent must have been more prohibitively expensive than ever, at this point, in Hampshire, where one economised.
It is possible that by now, Fanny Knight, at Godmersham, had been made a party to some of her Aunt Cassandra’s anxiety about their beloved Jane. It was not a subject Cassandra would have been likely to discuss either with her brothers or with their mother, who had established, years before, the fact that she must be protected from family anxiety of any kind. But Fanny, the dear niece, “almost another sister”, and twenty-four that January, would have been a natural confidante. After Jane Austen’s death, Cassandra was to write to Fanny thanking her for the letters with which she had cheered her aunt’s deathbed. “Never shall I forget the proofs of love you gave her during her illness in writing those kind, amusing letters at a time when I know your feelings would have dictated so different a style. Take the only reward I can give you in my assurance that your benevolent purpose was answered; you did contribute to her enjoyment.”
Fanny had done better than that. She had provided a distraction. Remembering the exchange about Mr. Plumtre years before, and that light-hearted agreeable flirtation with Mr. Haden, she now produced a Mr. Wildman of Chilham Castle, near Godmersham, for her aunt’s consideration. Perhaps she did not do it entirely seriously. Her letters do not survive, but they certainly served their purpose. “You are the delight of my life,” wrote her aunt. “Such letters, such entertaining letters as you have lately sent! — Such a description of your queer little heart! ... Who can keep pace with the fluctuations of your fancy, the capriccios of your taste, the contradictions of your feelings?” Jane Austen was not too ill to enjoy playing with words for her favourite niece. “It is very, very gratifying to me to know you so intimately,” she went on. “You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your heart — Oh! what a loss it will be when you are married. You are too agreeable in your single state, too agreeable as a niece. I shall hate you when your delicious play of mind is all settled down into conjugal and maternal affections.” And then, with a characteristic turn of argument, “And yet I do wish you to marry very much, because I know you will never be happy till you are.”
Fanny had apparently been brooding a little, or pretending to, about John Plumtre, the rejected suitor, who showed signs of marrying someone else. “My dearest Fanny, I cannot bear you should be unhappy about him.” And, earlier, “Why should you be living in dread of his marrying someone else? — (Yet how natural!) —You did not choose to have him yourself; why not allow him to take comfort where he can?” And, a subtle reminder, “You cannot forget how you felt under the idea of its having been possible that he might have dined in Hans Place.” Had Fanny been nervous of a possible encounter between staid John Plumtre and entertaining Mr. Haden?
Jane Austen was at her most realistic both about spinsterhood and about marriage in this batch of letters. “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor — which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.” But she had long since faced the fact that marriage, too, held its hazards. Mrs. Deedes, one of the vast Bridges tribe in Kent, had just had another child, and Jane had a characteristic comment. “Good Mrs. Deedes! — I hope she will get the better of this Marianne, and then I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms.” And, again, of her niece Anna, “Poor animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty — I am very sorry for her.” It was an argument for Fanny’s delay in choosing a husband. “By not beginning the business of mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in constitution, spirits, figure and countenance, while Mrs. William Hammond is growing old by confinements and nursing.”
Meanwhile, Fanny, the incorrigible creature, had been making her suitor, Mr. Wildman, read one of her aunt’s books, without telling him who had written it. “Have mercy on him,” said the author. “Tell him the truth and make him an apology.” Fanny had quoted poor Mr. Wildman’s adverse opinion to her aunt, who “had great amusement in reading it, and I hope I am not affronted”. But, “He and I should not in the least agree of course, in our ideas of novels and heroines — pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked.” There were no pictures of perfection in Sanditon. Jane Austen went on to confess that she had told Henry about Persuasion. “Do not be surprised at finding Uncle Henry acquainted with my having another ready for publication. I could not say No when he asked me, but he knows nothing more of it — You will not like it, so you need not be impatient. You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.” It seems to settle the question of whether Jane Austen saw herself in Anne Elliot.
Mrs. Frank Austen was to be confined again, and Charles was seriously worried about his second daughter, Harriet, who was suffering from headaches that might indicate water on the brain. And there was anxious news, too, from Scarlets, where Mrs. Austen’s brother James Leigh Perrot was seriously ill. Ailing herself, Jane Austen wrote of this without hypocrisy. “I shall be very glad when the event at Scarlets is over, the expectation of it keeps us in a worry, your grandm
amma especially; she sits brooding over evils which cannot be remedied and conduct impossible to be understood.” Austens and Leigh Perrots had drifted far apart over the years, but the impossible conduct was not yet at an end.
Fanny’s brothers were growing up. William and Henry had both been visiting at Chawton and their aunt was delighted with them. But, “You will have a great break-up at Godmersham in the spring, you must feel all their going. It is very right however.” Fanny, at twenty-four, had been mother and older sister both since she was sixteen and would inevitably feel the change caused by her younger brothers’ leaving home. But Jane Austen did not want her to plunge into marriage on this account. “Sweet Fanny, believe no such thing of yourself — Spread no such malicious slander upon your understanding ... Do not speak ill of your sense, merely for the gratification of your fancy — Yours is sense, which deserves more honourable treatment — You are not in love with him. You never have been really in love with him.”
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 24