Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  And then, one of those practical postscripts. “Uncle Henry and Miss Lloyd dine at Mr. Digweed’s today, which leaves us the power of asking Uncle and Aunt Frank to come and meet their nephews here.” It is hard to imagine how that modest house at Chawton could have accommodated four grown women, Uncle Henry and the two Knight nephews. Even with Cassandra in charge of the housekeeping, it can scarcely have been the ideal atmosphere for an invalid, however fond she was of all the people who crowded the house. It is possible that on this, as on other occasions, the Great House was used as an overflow, or annexe, but the burden of housekeeping would still have fallen on the Cottage. Caroline Austen said, “It was altogether a comfortable and ladylike establishment, though I believe the means that supported it were but small.” One must hope that when sons and nephews arrived, they brought, tactfully, the kind of contribution Anna Austen Lefroy made when she sent her grandmother a turkey that winter.

  Jane Austen was by now acknowledged to be ill. Her disease manifested itself now here, now there. In February she reported herself “almost entirely cured of my rheumatism ... Aunt Cassandra nursed me so beautifully!” On March 13th she had “got tolerably well again, quite equal to walking about and enjoying the air; and by sitting down and resting a good while between my walks, I get exercise enough.” She was planning, when spring came, to start riding the donkey which they kept to pull Mrs. Austen (or her ailing daughter) in a donkey cart. “It will be more independent,” said Jane Austen characteristically, “and less troublesome than the use of the carriage, and I shall be able to go about with Aunt Cassandra in her walks to Alton and Wyards.”

  Her next letter to Fanny, dated March 23rd, is less encouraging. “I certainly have not been well for many weeks, and about a week ago I was very poorly, I have had a good deal of fever at times and indifferent nights, but am considerably better now, and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again. Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.” For Jane Austen, whose “eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek”, this disfigurement of her clear complexion must have been something of a last straw. And, for Sir Zachary Cope, it is the clinching argument as to her complaint. The mottled black and white effect is significant of Addison’s disease. The illness had obviously made great, silent strides forward during that too-busy, too anxious winter, and Jane Austen was right in thinking sickness “a dangerous indulgence” at her time of life. But, whatever her secret feelings, she was not going to admit to them. “Air and exercise is what I want,” she told Fanny briskly, and, “Aunt Cass is such an excellent nurse, so assiduous and unwearied!” Jane Austen was now established as an invalid, and Cassandra as her nurse.

  But she did not lose interest in the outside world. Henry might hate London now, but Jane still followed the gossip. “If I were the Duchess of Richmond, I should be very miserable about my son’s choice. What can be expected from a Paget, born and brought up in the centre of conjugal infidelity and divorces?” Jane Austen knew all about Henry William Paget, Lord Uxbridge and later Marquess of Anglesey, whose liaison with the Duke of Wellington’s sister-in-law had made it difficult for the two men to serve together in the army. By the time of Waterloo, two divorces and two marriages had turned Mrs. Wellesley into Lady Uxbridge. At Waterloo, her husband commanded Wellington’s cavalry brilliantly, and, if she heard of it, which she probably did, Jane Austen would have enjoyed a laconic exchange between them. “By God,” said Uxbridge, looking down, “I’ve lost my leg.” “Have you, by God?” said Wellington, and rode on.

  By now, Caroline Austen as well as Fanny must have been writing letters intended to cheer up an invalid, for Jane Austen wrote to her on March 26th, “Pray make no apologies for writing to me often.” She had “taken one ride on the donkey and like it very much,” but admitted, “A great deal of wind does not suit me, as I have still a tendency to rheumatism. In short I am a poor honey at present. I will be better when you can come and see us.” She doubtless meant to be, but it is sadly significant that she had abandoned Sanditon ten days before.

  There was one pleasant piece of news for Caroline. Jane Austen had received nearly twenty pounds for the second edition of Sense and Sensibility. This was the last literary payment she was to receive during her lifetime. A note she wrote during the last months of her life lists the “Profits of my novels, over and above the £600 in the Navy Fives”, as follows:

  Residue from 1st Edition of Mansfield Park remaining in Henrietta Street, March 1816, £13 7s.

  Received from Egerton on 2nd Edition of Sense and Sensibility, March 1816, £12 15s.

  February 21st, 1817. First profits of Emma, £38 18s.

  March 7th, 1817. From Egerton. 2nd Edition of Sense and Sensibility, £19 13s.

  Presumably the £13 7s. was lost in Henry’s bankruptcy, so this makes Jane Austen’s total earnings during her lifetime £671 16s.

  Doctor Chapman accounts for the £600 in the Navy Fives as follows: Pride and Prejudice: £110, Sense and Sensibility: £140, Mansfield Park: £320, together with a first payment of about thirty pounds on the second edition of Sense and Sensibility, which was published late in 1813. Apparently Egerton made up his books and paid his authors annually in March, so Jane Austen finally got her thirty pounds odd for the second edition of Sense and Sensibility in March 1815. It was like the author of Persuasion to put her money into the Navy five per cents, and one can only hope that she got her thirty pounds a year regularly. It would have been a welcome addition to the income of the “comfortable and ladylike establishment”. The Austen ladies’ income must have shrunk considerably since the time of old Mr. Austen’s death, when Henry had written optimistically about how well off his mother and sisters would be on their four hundred and sixty pounds a year. It will be remembered that this was to be made up of contributions of a hundred pounds from Edward and fifty each from James, Frank and Henry to supplement Mrs. Austen’s own small income, and Cassandra’s, from the thousand pounds left her by her fiancé. Henry’s fifty obviously stopped on his bankruptcy in 1816, and Frank, too, seems to have stopped paying in 1816. When Jane Leigh Perrot finally wrote her sister-in-law with an offer of financial help in 1820 she got a grateful and detailed reply. James had continued to pay his annual fifty pounds up to his death the year before, and had also allowed his mother the forty pounds a year interest on the South Sea Stock belonging to her mentally deficient brother Thomas. Mrs. Austen’s own income was only a hundred and sixteen pounds a year plus six pounds rent from a little land at Steventon. Charles, the youngest son, had never contributed anything, and Frank may have been involved to some extent in Henry’s bankruptcy, for his contributions also ceased in 1816, and, though he later offered to resume them, his mother would not let him. He had responsibilities enough of his own: by 1820 his wife was bearing their ninth child. Edward, however, had given his mother two hundred pounds a year as well as “my house rent, supplies me plentifully with wood and makes me many kind presents”. But Edward had eleven children to start in the world, and at the time of his sister’s death, still had the lawsuit about the Hampshire estates hanging over him.

  17

  It must have been a sad winter at Chawton. But there was worse to come. On March 28th, Mrs. Austen’s rich brother James Leigh Perrot died and left a will that did not even mention her. Every-thing went to his wife for her lifetime, much of it absolutely, but with a large sum tied up in trust to revert to James Austen and his heirs when she died, together with legacies of a thousand pounds each to such of James’s brothers and sisters as should survive their aunt. It is impossible not to feel malice in this will, though the charitable have argued that James Leigh Perrot wished, most of all, to show his confidence in the wife who had been wrongly tried, so long ago, in 1800. Other defenders have pointed out that James Leigh Perrot had lost ten thousand pounds on Henry’s being declared bankrupt in 1816. But this hardly holds water, since his will
was made in March 1811.

  It is very likely, granted Mrs. Austen’s habitual ill health, that her brother assumed that he would survive her. Perhaps she was suffering from one of her ailments when he drew up his will in 1811. If so, it was as unlucky as the circumstances that kept her from her sister-in-law’s side at her trial, years before. As Jane Austen’s letters show, relations between Austens and Leigh Perrots had never been easy, and unfortunately there is a two-year gap in her correspondence before the date when James Leigh Perrot made his will. Had he and his difficult wife, for some reason, taken the move to Chawton in ill part? Or had he simply assumed that Edward was in a position to do everything that was necessary for his mother?

  At all events, just when medical expenses must have been mounting, and spirits low, the ladylike establishment at Chawton got nothing. It was a blow, and admitted as such. Jane Austen, who had written, so long ago, about the legacies that never seemed to come their way, could not manage to make a joke of this. She confessed, in a letter to Charles:

  A few days ago my complaint appeared removed, but I am ashamed to say that the shock of my uncle’s will brought on a relapse, and I was so ill on Friday and thought myself so likely to be worse that I could not but press for Cassandra’s returning with Frank after the funeral last night, which she of course did, and either her return, or my having seen Mr. Curtis, or my disorder’s choosing to go away, have made me better this morning. I live upstairs however for the present and am coddled. I am the only one of the legatees who has been so silly, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves. My mother has borne the forgetfulness of her extremely well — her expectations for herself were never beyond the extreme of moderation, and she thinks with you that my uncle always looked forward to surviving her.

  Jane Austen, who had such high standards of behaviour herself, must have minded the unkindness of the will as much as the financial disappointment. Once again the world was at work enriching James — at least in prospect — at the expense of the rest of his family. Jane went on to say that her mother “heartily wishes that her younger children had more, and all her children something immediately”. In fact, James did not survive to inherit. He died in 1819, the last year of his life having been embittered by a curiously mean action of Jane Leigh Perrot’s, who had withdrawn the annuity of a hundred pounds her husband had given James in 1808. Perhaps her offer of help to her sister-in-law, after James’s death, was some kind of a sop to her conscience. If so, it was a belated one.

  James Leigh Perrot’s will probably marked one more downward stage in his niece’s last illness. A disease that is brought on by mental distress will be advanced by it. But she wrote bravely and kindly to Charles, and was even able to speak well of the aunt she had never liked, who “felt the value of Cassandra’s company so fully, and was so very kind to her, and is poor woman so miserable at present ... that we feel more regard for her than we ever did before”. Charles was having a hard time. 1817 was a bad year for naval officers, and he, too, must have had hopes from his uncle’s will. The news of it seems to have made his sister-in-law (who had looked after his daughters since his wife’s death) ill too, and then there was little Harriet, with her headaches. “As for your poor little Harriet,” wrote her Aunt Jane, “I dare not be sanguine for her.” And, one of those significant postscripts of hers: “I have forgotten to take a proper-edged sheet of paper.” It was perhaps difficult to remember mourning paper for an uncle who had behaved so unkindly as James Leigh Perrot.

  The Austens were not the only ones to be left out of James Leigh Perrot’s will. There was no mention either of his nephew Edward Cooper, the only surviving child of Jane Leigh, sister to James Leigh Perrot and Cassandra Austen senior. As executor of his uncle’s will, James Austen had had the unpleasant duty of breaking this news to his cousin, and the result was an affronted letter to poor Jane. Beginning properly with regrets for her ill health and “the solicitude and agitation of mind” that her mother must have felt, he went on to his own grievance. “There was probably no reason why I should have expected any distinguished notice in his will: but I certainly never seriously anticipated the probability of being altogether excluded from it. And I must express to you that the circumstance of being thus disowned by him at last does hurt me a good deal.” Being a clergyman, he indulged himself in describing the prayers he had said for his uncle during his last illness, and in looking forward to a meeting “in another world, where mis-apprehension, misjudgment, and mis-representation will have no place”. Did Jane Austen feel haunted by Mr. Collins?

  We do not know whether she answered her cousin’s letter, but at the end of April she sat down and wrote her own will, simple and straightforward like one side of its author. “To my dearest sister Cassandra Elizabeth everything of which I may die possessed or which may be hereafter due to me subject to the payment of my funeral expenses and to a legacy of £50 to my brother Henry and £50 to Madame Bigion.” This latter was the faithful maid of Henry’s wife Eliza, who had cared for him after her death and had probably lost her savings in his bankruptcy. Dated April 27th, Jane Austen’s will named Cassandra as sole executrix, but the signature was not witnessed, and Charles’s brother and sister-in-law had to swear to its validity after Jane Austen’s death. Once again, no doubt, the two sisters had been conspiring together, as they had so often done before, to spare their mother pain. The will must be made, for Jane was too clear-headed to leave muddle, or the kind of misery her uncle had created, behind her, but it must be kept secret. This may be the explanation of the surprising — in that age — appointment of Cassandra as executrix, but it may well be that after long and varied experience of her brothers Jane Austen felt Cassandra the most competent to act. It is a text for feminists. Henry, however, acted with Cassandra as literary executor. After all, he had handled all Jane Austen’s books, though with varying success.

  This will must have been written in an interval of a serious bout of illness that struck Jane Austen that April. She had rallied briefly from the shock of her uncle’s will and then succumbed to a new attack, worse than any she had suffered before. Writing to her old friend Miss Sharpe on May 22nd she described herself as better, but admitted to having been “very ill indeed”. She had kept her bed “since the 13th of April, with only removals to a sofa”, but, “Now, I am getting well again ... and really am equal to being out of bed, but that the posture is thought good for me.” Their local apothecary from Alton had not been able to control her complaint, but Mr. Lyford[15] from Winchester had done so at last, and she now intended to go to Winchester and put herself under his care, rather than going to London, which had also been considered.

  The Austens had admitted at last that their Jane was very ill indeed. “How to do justice to the kindness of all my family during this illness, is quite beyond me! — Every dear brother so affectionate and so anxious! — and as for my sister! — Words must fail me in any attempt to describe what a nurse she has been to me. Thank God! she does not seem the worse for it yet, and as there was never any sitting-up necessary, I am willing to hope she has no after-fatigues to suffer from.” And then, characteristically, “I have so many alleviations and comforts to bless the Almighty for! — My head was always clear, and I have scarcely any pain; my chief sufferings were from feverish nights, weakness and languor.”

  With a touch of her old humour she described herself as “really a very genteel, portable sort of an invalid”. James was to lend his carriage to take her the sixteen miles to Winchester. “Now, that’s a sort of thing which Mrs. J. Austen does in the kindest manner! — But still she is in the main not a liberal-minded woman, and as to this reversionary property’s amending that part of her character, expect it not my dear Anne — too late, too late in the day.” Even the shadow of death would not stop Jane Austen facing facts. She had studied character too long and too closely to be ready for easy, optimistic solutions. And that she was aware of death, hovering, but temporarily withdrawn, is clear from the end of this letter: “I h
ave not mentioned my dear mother; she suffered much for me when I was at the worst, but is tolerably well. — Miss Lloyd too has been all kindness. In short, if I live to be an old woman, I must expect to wish I had died now; blessed in the tenderness of such a family, and before I had survived either them or their affection. — You would have held the memory of your friend Jane too in tender regret I am sure.” There is valediction in every line.

  It was at about this time that Caroline Austen had her last sight of her aunt. She was visiting her half-sister Anna Lefroy at Wyards, while her parents were at Scarlets helping Jane Leigh Perrot arrange her late husband’s affairs. Calling at Chawton, Caroline and Anna were taken upstairs to where their aunt “in her dressing-gown ... was sitting quite like an invalid in an arm-chair, but she got up and kindly greeted us, and then, pointing to seats which had been arranged for us by the fire, she said: ‘There is a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline.’” “I was struck,” Caroline reported, “by the alteration in herself. She was very pale, her voice was weak and low, and there was about her a general appearance of debility and suffering; but I have been told that she never had much acute pain. She was not equal to the exertion of talking to us, and our visit to the sick room was a very short one, Aunt Cassandra soon taking us away. I do not suppose we stayed a quarter of an hour; and I never saw Aunt Jane again.”

  The circumstances of this visit suggest one of the many good reasons that must have decided the move to Winchester. There was Mr. Lyford, of course, that “man of more than provincial reputation”, as he is described in the Memoir. Jane Austen, who thought him “very good”, obviously had confidence in him, and the move to Winchester was much easier than one to London, with its sad memories of Henry’s bankruptcy. And, clearly, a move had to be made. Chawton Cottage may have seemed “very snug” when the Austen ladies moved in, but it was no place to nurse a serious illness. One look at the tiny bedroom traditionally assigned to Cassandra and Jane makes one wonder how they could have fitted in a chair and a little stool by the fire, as well as the bare minimum furnishings of a bedroom. Perhaps Martha Lloyd, who had presumably been given the larger front room next to Mrs. Austen’s, had vacated it on Jane’s illness, and it is also possible that the house was to some extent remodelled during the nineteenth century, but the fact remained that all the bedrooms at Chawton were too close together to give even a minimum of privacy. And at seventy-seven Mrs. Austen had a right to be protected from the anguish of her younger daughter’s death, and Jane a right to be spared the pain of trying to protect her. One can only imagine the silent suffering of the “feverish nights” to which she confessed, when any undue movement must inevitably rouse her dear sister and nurse, and, in all probability, the other occupants of the cramped first floor at Chawton. It may well have been with feelings of relief that the two sisters left the invaluable Martha to look after their mother, and set off on their last journey together.