Quite where this famous story originated is a puzzle, as James Edward goes on to say that neither he nor his sisters (the main sources of all anecdotage about Austen) were ever aware of disturbing their aunt at her writing, and he makes it clear that there was no attempt at concealment ‘within her own family party’. But secrecy about her work became a cornerstone of the Austen myth; the image conjured up was of the endlessly patient genius putting the demands of family life, however petty, before her work, writing, when she could, in guarded but modest isolation in a corner of a shared sitting-room.
The truth is that Jane Austen never exhibited self-consciousness or shame about her writing, and never needed to. Unlike many women writers of her generation – or stories about them – she had no struggle for permission to write, no lack of access to books, paper and ink, no frowning paterfamilias to face down or from whom to conceal her scribbling. Her ease and pleasure in writing as an occupation are evident from the very beginning, as is the full encouragement of her family, and if there was little space in her various homes, that was more a simple fact of life and square-footage in relatively cramped households than a metaphor for creative limitations.
What James Edward Austen-Leigh’s testimony really reveals is not the author’s lack of vanity but how much her writing was accepted, and even overlooked, within her family. Austen is now such a towering figure in literature and myth that it is hard to reinsert her in her home environment and not still see a genius: even James Edward was blinded by the awe-factor by the time he came to write her biography, fifty years after his aunt’s death. A generation younger than her, he was one of the last to find out that Aunt Jane was the anonymous ‘Author of “Sense & Sensibility”, “Pride & Prejudice” etc.’ His surprise at this news, and his subsequent interest in his aunt, mark him out as not of the inner circle. They were not so susceptible to awe.
This is not to say that Austen’s closest family were indifferent to her ambitions and achievements as a writer, or callously withholding of praise, but that the home context of genius is by definition utterly unlike any other. According to the theorist Leo Braudy, fame can be thought of as having four elements: a person, an accomplishment, their immediate publicity and what posterity makes of them.2 The ‘immediate publicity’ of Jane Austen’s fame is interesting not so much in how and where her books were reviewed or what her contemporaries thought of them, but in how she was treated in her own circle, and what sort of climate that provided. And the reason why Jane Austen did not require, or receive, any special treatment within her family was that she was by no means the only writer among them.
Jane was the second youngest of the Austen children, ten years younger than her eldest brother, James, and two years younger than her only sister, Cassandra. She was born and lived the first twenty-six years of her life at Steventon, on the north-easterly edges of Hampshire; her father, the Reverend George Austen, was a clever, gentle man, her mother, Cassandra Leigh, a highly articulate woman with aristocratic ancestors, niece of a famous Oxford scholar and wit. The family was only modestly well-off, and Jane’s lively, good-looking and accomplished brothers had to make their own ways in the world; James and Henry, both Oxford graduates, joined the Church and the Army, Francis and Charles joined the Navy, and lucky Edward was adopted by childless relatives, Mr and Mrs Thomas Knight of Godmersham, sent on the Grand Tour and made heir to their estates in Kent and Hampshire. Only George, the second son, did not share the family’s health and success; disabled in some way, he spent his life being cared for elsewhere and hardly appears in the family records at all.
Jane and her beloved elder sister Cassandra grew up surrounded by boys, for the Reverend Austen supplemented his clerical income by taking in pupils, running in effect a small school for the sons of the local gentry. Though the girls were later sent away to school briefly in Oxford, Reading and Southampton, they spent most of their childhood in the more challenging intellectual atmosphere of their own home. At the Rectory, there was a well-stocked library that included works of history, poetry, topography, the great essayists of the century, and plenty of fiction, for the Austens were ‘great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’3 and subscribed to the local circulating library, which held copies of all the recent bestsellers. Jane was a fan of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, Mrs Radcliffe, Mrs Inchbald and a host of less memorable eighteenth-century romancers, lapping up their stories and lampooning their more absurd conventions with equal glee. ‘From an early age,’ the critic Isobel Grundy has noted, ‘she read like a potential author. She looked for what she could use – not by quietly absorbing and reflecting it, but by actively engaging, rewriting, often mocking it.’4
Like the eponymous heroine of her early story, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, the teenaged Jane was ‘well-read in Modern History’ and left more than a hundred marginal notes in a schoolroom copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1771 History of England, still in the possession of the Austen family. Her cheeky ripostes, mostly in defence of her favourites, the Stuarts, give a strong impression of her intellectual confidence, as well as of her pleasure in acting as the classroom wit. In the same irreverent spirit, Austen wrote her own pro-Stuart ‘History of England’ in 1791, for recital and circulation among the family. Her section on Henry VIII begins like this:
It would be an affront to my Readers were I to suppose that they were not as well acquainted with the particulars of this King’s reign as I am myself. It will therefore be saving them the task of reading again what they have read before, and myself the trouble of writing what I do not perfectly recollect, by giving only a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign.5
When ‘The History of England’ was eventually published, in 1922, Virginia Woolf characterised the girlish author as ‘laughing, in her corner, at the world’, but the writer of such a brilliant comic party-piece was hardly the shrinking (or smirking) violet Woolf imagines, but a quick-witted, praise-hungry teenager, competing for attention in a close, loving, intellectually competitive household. With people outside her immediate circle, whose approval she didn’t seek or value, Austen was likely to fall silent; hence her cousin Philadelphia’s description of Jane in 1788 as ‘whimsical & affected … not at all pretty & very prim, unlike a girl of twelve’.6 The family, especially those she was closest to, Cassandra, Henry, Frank, Charles and her father, would have known very well how ‘unlike a girl of twelve’ Jane was, how fanciful and how funny. But she didn’t always choose to perform.
In the years between 1788 and 1792, that is, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, Jane copied up her skits, plays and stories into three notebooks titled humorously ‘Volume the First’, ‘Volume the Second’ and ‘Volume the Third’, named as if they were instalments of a conventional three-part novel. There was a habit among the Austens of using high-quality quarto notebooks (and one’s best handwriting) to make, in effect, manuscript books to be passed round and enjoyed in the family; editions of one, but still editions. Much later, in 1812, Jane made a reference in a letter to a comic quatrain she had written, and sent to her brother James for his comments, being added to ‘the Steventon Edition’.7 As with so many of Austen’s familiar references, it’s not clear exactly what she meant by this, but the phrase and its context suggest an album in which the family verses were collected. James Austen’s own poems and verse prologues have survived largely because his three children made copies of them in similar quarto volumes.8
Almost every item in Jane Austen’s juvenilia has an elaborate, mock-serious dedication to one or other member of the family circle; her brothers, both parents, her cousins Eliza de Feuillide and Jane Cooper, and friends Martha and Mary Lloyd. Cassandra, who had provided Jane with thirteen charming watercolour vignettes as illustrations to ‘The History of England’, received this dedication to ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, Jane’s unfinished but ambitious early novel:
Madam
Encouraged by your warm patronage of The beautiful Cassandra, and T
he History of England, which through your generous support, have obtained a place in every library in the Kingdom, and run through threescore Editions, I take the liberty of begging the same Exertions in favour of the following Novel, which I humbly flatter myself, possesses Merit beyond any already published, or any that will ever in future appear, except as may proceed from the pen of Your Most Grateful Humble Servt. The Author9
Behind the humour is a familiarity with book production and distribution as well as patronage, and a tacit acknowledgment of her own ambitions, which ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ (the only substantial non-burlesque story by Jane to have survived from these early years) was clearly meant to advance.
Jane’s writing was encouraged in particular by her father, with whom she was something of a favourite (Mrs Austen favoured her first-born, James). The portable writing-desk which Jane bequeathed to her niece Caroline, and which is now on display in the British Library, is thought to have been a gift from him.10 He certainly gave her the white vellum notebook which became ‘Volume the Second’ (she has inscribed it ‘Ex Dono Mei Patris’), and probably also provided Volume the Third, as he wrote a mock-commendation inside the front cover: ‘Effusions of Fancy/by a very Young Lady/Consisting of Tales/in a Style entirely new’, sportingly joining in the spirit of her enterprise. In Austen’s surviving letters, the earliest of which dates from 1796, it is her father who is depicted as most close to her own interest in books, literary periodicals and the circulating library, and with whom she shares and discusses the latest novels.
James Austen later characterised the family bookishness in this way:
We love, & much enjoy with ivory knife
To sever the yet damp & clinging leaves
Of some new volume; & can pleased discuss
With critical acumen & due skill,
An Author’s merit: Authors too ourselves
Not seldom, & recite without much fear
To hearers kindly partial, verse or prose,
Song, parody or tale, whose themes of high
But local import, well record the fate
Of cat or pony: or, from satire free
Raise against other’s follies or our own
Perchance, the fair & inoffensive laugh.11
Writing and reading – and sharing both with like minds in the family – was not a mere pastime for the Austens, but an essential part of their lives. They were a very verbal tribe, and Jane’s contributions to the family’s entertainment, however original, would have appeared to them to corroborate a shared trait, not necessarily to display an individual one. The family was full of people who prided themselves on their own writing talent and wit, ‘authors too ourselves’, not least Jane’s mother, a keen, sometimes unstoppable versifier.12More pertinently, for the development of Jane Austen’s sense of herself as a writer, the family had plenty of committed, quasi-professional authors in their circle, too. Two of her brothers, two first cousins, an aunt, two second cousins and a neighbour were all published authors,13 and others in her circle strove to be.
James Edward Austen-Leigh later emphasised his aunt’s ‘entire seclusion’ from the literary world, ‘neither by correspondence, nor by personal intercourse was she known to any contemporary authors’,14 giving a very misleading impression of her isolation and ignorance. Though it is true that Austen declined the few opportunities that she got in adult life to meet celebrity authors, she grew up in an atmosphere of informed interest in all aspects of print culture and had before her a surprising number of writers and would-be writers to learn from.
The first published writer Jane Austen had the chance to observe at close quarters was a poet called Samuel Egerton Brydges, the younger brother of Jane’s friend and mentor, Anne Lefroy. Mrs Lefroy, who was married to the rector of the nearby village of Ashe, was a highly cultivated and intelligent woman, herself a poet who had published in the Poetical Register.15 According to her brother’s later tribute, she had ‘a warm and rapid poetical genius; she read voraciously; her apprehension was like lightning, and her memory was miraculous’.16 Brydges was only twenty-three when he came with his new bride, Elizabeth, and younger sister, Charlotte, to live in the vicinity of Mrs Lefroy and her husband in 1786, but he was already suffering from thwarted poetical ambition due to the disappointing reception of his first book, Sonnets and other Poems; with a Versification of The Six Bards of Ossian, which includes the quatrain,
Yet, o beloved Muse, if in me glow
Ambition for false fame, the thirst abate!
Teach me, fair fields and flocks, mankind to know,
And ope my eyes to all, that’s truly great.17
If this was his agenda on arrival in Deane, the poet didn’t keep to it, but sank into a melancholy quite as powerful as any he’d been able to imagine. Looking back on the years 1785–91, he thought them ‘amongst the most wearisome and low-spirited of my life … in which my pride was most mortified and my self-complacence most disturbed’.18
Brydges found fame in the 1790s as a novelist, but he never got over his early failure as a poet and his 1834 autobiography is full of complaints about the unjust neglect of his genius and how it had exacerbated his ‘morbid sensitiveness’.19 He must have harped on the theme a great deal during his time at Deane, when he wasn’t enacting it in gloomy reverie.
Jane was only ten when the melancholic poet became their neighbour. She was virtually beneath his notice – until, many years later, her fame prompted him to recall that she had been ‘very intimate’ with his brilliant older sister, ‘and much encouraged by her’. ‘When I knew Jane Austen I never suspected that she was an authoress,’ he wrote in 1834. ‘The last time I think that I saw her was at Ramsgate in 1803: perhaps she was then about twenty-seven years old. Even then I did not know that she was addicted to literary composition.’20 The phrase is an excellent one for Jane, who was indeed gripped by a sort of mania for writing in her early teens, and who later told her niece Caroline she wished she had ‘read more, and written less’ in those years, when she had been ‘much taken up with’ her own compositions.21
The fellow-addict whom Brydges did recognise at Deane was James Austen, undoubtedly the most ambitious, talented and promising writer in the young Jane Austen’s immediate circle. His seniority, his sex and his choice of the art of poetry over prose meant that even after his sister had become a highly praised novelist, he was in all important respects still regarded as the writer of the family. A distant figure to the younger children, Cassandra and Jane (who were only five and three when he went up to St John’s College, Oxford, at the age of fourteen), James was also precociously talented; his earliest surviving poem, addressed to his boyhood friend Fulwar Craven Fowle, imagines them in later life, Fowle a successful statesman and James a secluded poet, whose fate is ‘to woo in lowly strain/The nymphs of fountain, wood or plain/To bless my peaceful lays’. Imminent retreat from ‘tumultuous strife’ was a theme the world-weary sixteen-year-old kept returning to:
Nor er’e shall I with envy view their fate
Whilst solid bliss that ne’er can cloy
Thro’ life’s retired vale my steps await.22
His plan was to take his degree and Holy Orders and lead a life given over mainly to poetry and his other great enthusiasm, the hunt. ‘Place me in farthest Scythia’s trackless waste’ could be taken to mean a nice Hampshire living where he could keep a pack of harriers and court his muse, for James was not an urban creature like his younger brother Henry and valued solitude and rural quiet rather more than is natural in a youth, even a poetical youth. Gray and Cowper, the most popular poets of the age gone by, were his models in language and form, but his melancholic sensibility was more in tune with the coming Romantics.
All through Jane’s childhood, the visits home of this sophisticated, ambitious and scholarly brother must have impressed her deeply. He was the moving force behind the home theatricals that were put on at Steventon, in the parlour and in the barn across the road, for seven consecutive years i
n the 1780s. As with the amateur theatricals which Jane later described so vividly in Mansfield Park, these productions must have galvanised the whole household, with all the demands of scenery and costume-making, learning lines and rehearsing. Jane was too young to take part until the later productions, but would have been a keen observer of all the preparations for Matilda and The Rivals in 1782 and 1784, with James in charge of an excited group of young people drawn from the family, the Reverend Austen’s pupils, neighbours and friends. The productions were also showcases for James’s own writing talents, as he composed prologues and epilogues for most of the plays they performed. Some were lengthy and elaborate, such as the prologue to Fielding’s Tragedy of Tom Thumb in which James surveyed a number of favourite sports and pastimes, wittily pointing out how arduous leisure can be, and ending with an evocation of his own preferred occupation, being a writer:
To please no numerous crowd he e’er pretends –
He writes & lives but for his private friends.
Their vacant hours to amuse, his favourite toil,
And his best thanks are their approving smile –23
When they put on The Wonder, the Austens’ glamorous and flirtatious cousin, Contesse Eliza de Feuillide, was visiting Steventon and took the part of Violante. James, who was under his cousin’s spell for many years (as was Henry, whom she later married), must have enjoyed putting these words into her mouth:
Jane's Fame Page 2