Such was poor woman’s lot – whilst tyrant men
At once possessors of the sword & pen
All female claim, with stern pedantic pride
To prudence, truth & secrecy denied,
Covered their tyranny with specious words,
That called themselves creation’s mighty Lords –
But thank our happier stars, those days are o’er,
And woman holds a second place no more.
Now forced to quit their long held usurpation,
These men all wise, these Lords of the Creation!
To our superior rule themselves submit,
Slaves to our charms, & vassals to our wit.24
Of course, such sentiments, coming from a young man who thinks of himself as ‘possessor of the pen’, are as much an expression of his own anxieties as a welcome to the changing status of women. Jane, aged twelve, had fully absorbed the ambiguous messages of the day about women’s rights in general and female ‘scribblers’ in particular, and in her juvenilia (contemporary with these pieces by James) was already showing her complete awareness that the cardinal sin for a woman writer was lack of humour about her own position. Even if one was not prepared to be self-deprecating, the subject had to be treated lightly.
Six years after taking his BA, James Austen returned to Oxford with an ambitious plan to start up his own literary periodical. Henry had gone up to St John’s in 1788, ten years after James’s own promising start there, and the younger brother’s high spirits and literary talent may have been behind the scheme to venture into print. In the years following his graduation, James had been travelling on the Continent, had taken Holy Orders, received his MA and first curacy. But as it approached, the retirement he had imagined for himself must have begun to look a little less attractive, for this was exactly the moment when he decided to take the only big risk of his life, and ‘go public’ as a man of letters.
James’s son, James Edward, said later that his father ‘used to speak very slightingly’ of The Loiterer,25 but this says more about James’s disappointments in later life than the lively publication he produced every Saturday, without a hitch, from January 1789 to March 1790. For all its provincial origins, the Austen brothers clearly did not intend to limit The Loiterer’s potential audience to that of Oxford university or town. The title, a witty rejoinder to The Idler, The Rambler, The Tatler and The Spectator, ought, they reckoned, to appeal to ‘four-fifths of the English nation’.26 Within five issues, they had found distributors in Birmingham and London (the publisher Thomas Egerton) and a month later had spread out to Bath and Reading. At threepence a copy, the price was low. The issues were short, often consisting of a single essay or article, but the necessity of writing and printing them with such frequency, and the business of dealing with printers and distributors, must have taken up most of James’s time and energy that year, when, one presumes, he was more often in Oxford than Hampshire.
Back at Steventon, the thirteen-year-old Jane Austen would have been among the magazine’s keenest readers, having been privy to excited planning between James, Henry and their cousin Edward Cooper (also an Oxford undergraduate at the time) when everyone was together at Steventon for Christmas, 1789. The first issue of The Loiterer was published just a month later by this ‘small Society of Friends, who have long been accustomed to devote our winter evenings to something like learned pursuits’.27 The optimism with which it was launched suggests that the project had the full backing of the Austen parents (it is hard to see how it could have happened without some financial support as well), and the editorial stance of The Loiterer was completely in tune with the Austen family manner of gentle mockery and disingenuous self-deprecation. The editors justified their enterprise by claiming that ‘to keep our talent any longer wrapt in the napkin would be equal injustice to our writings, the world, and ourselves – ’,28 and the content, which started off mostly in the vein of short, slightly pompous musings on life and literature, evolved gradually into displays of individual taste, with James, the most frequent contributor, showing an increasing interest in writing fiction. His tale of ‘Cecilia’ takes up two issues of the magazine – a risky editorial decision – and deals with just the themes that were to become central in Jane’s novels, the moral choices which young women face in courtship and matrimony. ‘Though an union of love may have some misery,’ the author concludes, ‘a marriage of interest can give no happiness.’29
The temptation for the young Jane Austen to join in this exciting publishing venture in her own family must have been overpowering, and one contribution in particular, a letter published in number 9 of The Loiterer, has attracted the attention of critics as possibly having been written by her, constituting her first appearance in print. The letter, signed ‘Sophia Sentiment’, is a comically overstated (but sincere-sounding) complaint that The Loiterer is not only too reliant on Oxford in-jokes, but ignores female tastes and female readers (it predates James’s ‘Cecilia’ story by several months): ‘you have never yet dedicated one number to the amusement of our sex, and have taken no more notice of us, than if you thought, like the Turks, we had no souls.’ The writer has many suggestions of the kind of thing that would do instead: ‘let us see some nice affecting stories, relating the misfortunes of two lovers, who died suddenly, just as they were going to church. Let the lover be killed in a duel, or lost at sea, or you may make him shoot himself, just as you please; and as for his mistress, she will of course go mad … only remember, whatever you do, that your hero and heroine must possess a good deal of feeling, and have very pretty names.’30 Though this could, at a pinch, have been written by Henry, the absurd tone and bravado are exactly those of Jane’s own pastiches of sentimental literature, ‘Love and Freindship’, ‘Lesley Castle’ and ‘The Three Sisters’, which she was writing at the same time, and which everyone at home knew about. Writing to The Loiterer would have been just the sort of pert joke Jane specialised in.31
The fact that James worked so hard on The Loiterer for over a year and then gave up so abruptly suggests that he was cutting his losses. He was also, possibly, sorely disappointed. There is a plangent tone to his farewell essay, in which he thanks the friends who had contributed to the magazine and cites several of ‘many sufficient causes’ for the periodical closing, ‘the short list of my subscribers, and the long bill of my publisher’ being perhaps the most pressing.32 But he also admits to a certain degree of editorial miscalculation, having changed tack from his initial objective of making his main matter ‘the circles of Oxford … some portraits and some scenes’, to a broadening out of subjects in the hope of appealing to a wider audience (in exactly the way suggested by ‘Sophia Sentiment’’s letter). The Loiterer actually achieved as much as, if not more than, the editor-in-chief could have expected, but perhaps his expectations had not been reasonable. George Holbert Tucker, one of the few biographers to pay much attention to James Austen, has described his personality as ‘an unequal blending of sociability and brooding melancholy, the latter predominating as he grew older’.33 James retired to his country living and in 1792 married a well-to-do young woman, Anne Mathew. He published nothing after The Loiterer – perhaps he disdained to, preferring to remain an unrecognised genius – but he certainly continued to write. As he had said in the first issue of his magazine, ‘of all chymical mixtures, ink is the most dangerous, and he who has once dipped his fingers in it –’.34
The skits and stories of Jane’s earliest surviving manuscript, ‘Volume the First’ (all completed well before her fifteenth birthday), show that she was every bit as ambitious as her brother had been at the same age, but would never open herself up to the charge of self-importance by appearing to take herself too seriously. She sought to amuse and amaze her family circle with knockabout comedies full of abductions, abandonments, exotic accidents, adultery and death (all the sort of spicy drama that is absent or carefully backgrounded in her adult fiction). From the dedication of her absurd sketch ‘The Visit’, which m
entions two earlier works that have not survived, it is clear that she had written short comedies as early as 1788 or 1789. The title of one of these lost plays, ‘The school for Jealousy’, immediately recalls that of Sheridan’s School for Scandal (and perhaps lampooned Henry and James’s joint infatuation with their cousin Eliza?); the other, ‘The travelled Man’, might well have taken James’s Continental tour of 1786–7 as its subject.35 ‘The Visit’ itself is dedicated to James, and is fondly and jokingly recommended ‘to your Protection and Patronage’. Although she was ten years his junior, Jane was already aligning herself with ‘the writer of the family’, and seeking to be the cadet comic counterpart of this much-admired older brother.
One wonders what James made of his little sister’s skits, which she must have hoped would be taken up in some way by the older siblings at their theatricals. ‘The Visit’, which ends with three proposals and engagements effected in four lines, involves an absurd scene where eight guests are provided with only six chairs and two of the ladies have to have men sitting in their laps: ‘I beg you will make no apologies,’ Sophy says. ‘Your Brother is very light.’36 But could any of the amateur actors at Steventon have done justice to the brilliance of ‘The Mystery’, in which all the characteristics of drama are deliberately absent? In one scene, a lone character, Corydon, enters and says, ‘But Hush! I am interrupted’; in another, the action is already over, and the characters, having nothing to tell each other, decide to leave. The second scene is entirely made up of this brief dialogue between a father and son:
Enter Old Humbug and his Son, talking.
Old Hum:) It is for that reason I wish you to follow my advice. Are you convinced of its propriety?
Young Hum:) I am Sir, and will certainly act in the manner you have pointed out to me.
Old Hum:) Then let us return to the House. (Exeunt)37
Aged thirteen or fourteen, Jane Austen was like a jolly Samuel Beckett! The juvenilia are full of sophisticated absurdity like this, as in ‘Jack and Alice’: ‘A lovely young Woman lying apparently in great pain beneath a Citron tree was an object too interesting not to attract their notice’; or this deadpan description from ‘Lesley Castle’: ‘She is remarkably good-tempered when she has her own way, and very lively when she is not out of humour.’38 The young author lights on one style after another with remarkable virtuosity, impatient of longer, extended writing. Perhaps that was a sign of her eagerness to get things out before an audience, and enjoy their response. Their response has almost always been very carefully anticipated and engineered.
* * *
Several of Jane’s relations on the distaff side also had thoroughly inky fingers. James Henry Leigh, the heir to Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, had published his book of verse, The New Rosciad, in 1785, and Cassandra, Lady Hawke’s novel Julia de Gramont appeared in 1788. Among the unpublished writers was Mrs Austen’s first cousin, Mary Leigh, elder of the two daughters of Dr Theophilus Leigh of Balliol (who was still Master when the Austen brothers went up to the university). Mary Leigh was a scholarly, childless woman who was the family historian and made ‘copious extracts and abridgements’ of historical and theological works, according to a biographical note written by her husband, the Reverend Thomas Leigh. Leigh also, fleetingly, mentions that his wife ‘spent more time than agreed with her health’ writing ‘some Novels highly moral and entertaining’.39 Nothing about these novels – not even a title – has survived, but it is highly likely that they were known and read by the Austen family, in whom Mary Leigh took a great interest.
Mary’s younger sister, Cassandra Cooke, was to play an important role in Jane Austen’s early contact with the literary world, not so much because of her own writing (though the progress of Mrs Cooke’s novel Battleridge through the press in 1798–9 and its indifferent reception must have fascinated Jane), but due to an accident of location. In 1793, Fanny Burney, the literary celebrity whom Jane Austen considered ‘the very best of English novelists’,40 came to live in a house almost opposite the Cookes in Great Bookham, Surrey. Madame d’Arblay (as Burney was known after her marriage) liked her new neighbours at once. Reverend Cooke officiated at the baptism of her only child, Alexander, in December 1794, and she and his wife were soon sharing newspapers and periodicals (including the Critical Review) and speculating primly together over the morals of their neighbours.41
Cassandra Cooke became particularly animated and active around the publication of Burney’s long-awaited third novel, Camilla, in 1795–6. Burney was one of the bestselling authors of the day, but it was publishers, not her, who had made money from the books: Evelina had been sold outright for a mere £30 and Cecilia for £250. Mrs Cooke must have been discussing the novelist’s losses with her contacts in Oxford, one of whom passed on the warning to Madame d’Arblay ‘not to be again, as he hears I have been, the dupe of Booksellers’.42 Further in her capacity as agent/adviser, Mrs Cooke passed on to the novelist the information that ‘a Relation of hers’ involved in publishing business with Robson of Bond Street had heard that Payne and Cadell, the publishers of Cecilia, ‘cleared 1500 pounds the first Year!’.43 The new novel, Mrs Cooke believed, should be published by subscription, giving the author a large, guaranteed profit. Burney followed her advice and it paid off handsomely: she raised about a thousand pounds from the subscription to Camilla, and went on to sell the copyright for another thousand soon after publication – a record sum at the time.
Burney’s thirty-five-page list of subscribers to Camilla included a dazzling array of the nation’s great and good (she had been at Court for five years, and was extremely well-connected) and a number of people from the Leigh and Austen circles, including ‘Miss J. Austen, Steventon’. It must have been thrilling to the nineteen-year-old to have a stake, however small, in her favourite authoress’s new work and to see her name printed in the first volume (the only time she would have ever seen her name in print: her own novels were all published anonymously). The book itself influenced her deeply and is, along with Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, the most frequently mentioned in her Letters, as well as being singled out in Austen’s famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey as a work in which ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.
By this date, Austen had probably already written the first version of ‘Elinor and Marianne’ (that became Sense and Sensibility), and possibly the undated epistolary novel ‘Lady Susan’; later in the same year she began writing ‘First Impressions’. Her own story (whose final title, Pride and Prejudice, may derive from the repetition of those words in the final paragraph of Burney’s Cecilia) has so many resonances with Camilla as to constitute a form of elaborate homage; Darcy being haughty at the Meryton ball, the Bennet sisters being held back at Netherfield by the rain, Mary Bennet’s piano-playing, Mr Bennet’s regret over his wife’s silliness, all have equivalents in characters and situations in Burney’s novel. Even Austen’s famous first sentence has an echo in one of Burney’s: ‘[It is] received wisdom among match-makers, that a young lady without fortune has a less and less chance of getting off upon every public appearance.’44
Austen was an ardent, but not doting, fan. Her enjoyment of Camilla didn’t prevent her from pencilling in a droll joke at the end of her copy (now in the Bodleian Library), acknowledging how artificially Burney had prolonged the novel’s central crisis: ‘Since this work went to the press a circumstance of some assistance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that Dr Marchmont has at last died.’ Similarly, Austen was far from starstruck by Burney’s recent accessibility in Bookham and friendship with her aunt Cooke. There are no recorded instances of their meeting, but given the Austens’ regular visits to Bookham and the frequent commerce between Madame d’Arblay and the rector’s wife (not least at church services) it is highly likely that Austen had sightings of the novelist, and may well have be
en introduced to her. Madame d’Arblay, her gentle emigré husband and their adored toddler son were, for the three years they lived opposite the Cookes, the most exciting residents Bookham had ever known. But to a thoughtful observer such as Jane Austen, it would have been clear that contact with the celebrities was much more likely to disillusion than gratify.
Mrs Cooke’s own novel, privately printed in 1799, Battleridge: An Historical Tale, Founded on Facts, ‘by a Lady of Quality’, is not mentioned either in her surviving letters to Fanny Burney, nor in Burney’s voluminous journals and letters, so it seems likely that she kept her authorship a secret from her famous acquaintance. The Austens, however, were fully aware of the book’s progress; Jane remarked in a letter of October 1798 that Mrs Cooke was disappointed by a series of delays with the printer, Cawthorn, and ‘never means to employ him again’. The Steventon family almost certainly enjoyed the novel in the way they enjoyed all such nonsense – noblemen going feral, ladies having fits, evil-minded men indulging their lusts – and Mrs Cooke’s pedantry would have afforded the author of ‘The History of England’ some wry smiles (Mrs Cooke disdains to describe the Restoration because ‘the majesty of history would be disgraced by the flow of fiction’). But the one review which Battleridge received, in the very periodical Mrs Cooke was sharing with the d’Arblays, was devastatingly bad: ‘The work is not very amusing; and in point of composition, it is despicable.’45
By the end of the 1790s, the examples of Mrs Cooke and Egerton Brydges interested Jane Austen for professional as well as literary reasons. Brydges had become surprisingly successful after leaving Deane, founding a periodical called The Topographer with an old friend from Cambridge and then taking to fiction-writing. Of all his publications, The Topographer probably appealed most to young Jane Austen, who loved Gilpin’s books on the picturesque and would very likely have read and discussed the magazine and its interesting illustrations with Anne Lefroy. One commentator has gone as far as to suggest that Austen’s description of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice owes something to Brydges’s series of articles about a journey through the Midlands which included Chatsworth in Derbyshire and ‘the most perfect house in England’, Kedleston.46
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