Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  Brydges indulged some absurd pretensions about his novels, claiming that they were pure gifts of inspiration; all he did was write down ‘as carelessly as they rose, some of the thoughts that were playing about my fancy’.47 He said that he composed his first novel in a trance-like state of ‘fervid rapidity’,48 sending the sheets to the printer as fast as they were finished. Unlike Mrs Cooke, Brydges didn’t publish at his own cost, but sold the copyright to a firm in Dublin, glad to avoid liability for the expenses. But when the novel subsequently did quite well, he probably came to regret the loss of the rights.

  The author of Mary de Clifford showed frequent lapses of ingenuity. At the end of a duel scene, where the hero half-utters the name of the heroine before his mighty soul departs for a better place, Brydges concludes, ‘I cannot attempt to describe the remainder of this affecting scene. To those who feel as I do, the recital would be too terrible to give pleasure.’49 This begged to be lampooned, and no doubt the Austens read passages aloud to each other with relish. As Mr Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice, ‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’50 By the time Brydges’s next novel, Arthur Fitz-Albini, was published in 1798, Jane was twenty-two and the author of several unpublished novels herself. George Austen ordered a copy of the new book, against Jane’s ‘private wishes’, as she wrote to Cassandra, ‘for it does not quite satisfy my feelings that we should purchase the only one of Egerton’s works of which his family are ashamed’.51 By ‘family’, she almost certainly meant Mrs Lefroy, who might well have been distressed at her brother’s thinly veiled picture of life at Deane, Ashe and Steventon. Years later, Brydges professed himself puzzled that the book ‘gave great offence to some of my country neighbours, who supposed their characters alluded to’,52 but as he describes all the country folk as uncongenial boobies, provoking in the hero ‘disgust … driving him to the society of his books, his own thoughts, and a few sensible friends’, their reaction was not surprising. And, as Jane wrote to her sister:

  My father is disappointed – I am not, for I expected nothing better. Never did any book carry more internal evidence of its author. Every sentiment is completely Egerton’s. There is very little story, and what there is is told in a strange, unconnected way. There are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated.53

  Here we get a unique glimpse of Austen, in her mid-twenties, scrutinising the work of someone known to her. Her tone of impatience is surely not just due to the shortcomings of Egerton’s novel, but to the fact that productions of its kind were preferred over her own. Jane had moved on, in her late teens, from burlesques and stories for family consumption to a different sort of writing altogether, the full-length novel. ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ was the beginning of one (that she kept, and tinkered with, all her life); another was ‘Elinor and Marianne’, the early version of Sense and Sensibility, which she is thought to have written, or conceived, as an epistolary novel. Cassandra, the only source of information about the dates of Jane’s compositions, was a bit vague about ‘Elinor and Marianne’, saying that as far as she could remember it had ‘something of the same story & characters’ as the published book.54 Jane’s revisions, then, must have amounted to an almost complete rewrite, or series of transformations, lasting years.

  The novel which Jane had begun in October 1796, ‘First Impressions’, might also have been epistolary – there are still forty-three letters in the book it became, Pride and Prejudice, and letter-writing is integral to the plot. ‘First Impressions’ was finished in ten months and immediately passed round and read aloud to members of the family, who were, not surprisingly, charmed and delighted by it. Jane’s father was so completely sure that it could and should be published that he took the bold step of writing to the well-known London publisher Thomas Cadell, the firm who the year before had published Fanny Burney’s Camilla:

  1 November 1797

  Sirs,

  I have in my possession a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols. About the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina. As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make it’s first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you. Shall be much obliged therefore if you will inform me whether you chuse to be concerned in it; What will be the expence of publishing at the Author’s risk; & what you will venture to advance for the Property of it, if on perusal, it is approved of?

  Should your answer give me encouragement I will send you the Work.55

  This letter only came to light seventy years later, among Cadell’s papers, and is the only evidence that there was any attempt before 1803 to solicit publication for one of Jane’s works. (It should be noted that the letter doesn’t specify which novel or, indeed, which author is involved, but the assumption has always been that the author was Jane and the novel her most recently completed one, ‘First Impressions’.) George Austen’s comparison of the novel’s length with Burney’s Evelina is clearly meant to suggest other similarities with the charming 1778 bestseller, not least that that debut novel made a fortune for its publisher, Thomas Lowndes. But Cadell’s answer was far from ‘giving encouragement’: by return of post he declined Reverend Austen’s offer and so ‘the Work’ never left Steventon.

  Lucky Jane, though, to have a parent who was so active on her behalf, and whose pride in his daughter’s achievement shines through this slightly mis-aimed business letter. There’s no reason to assume this was an isolated experiment, or that Jane was seriously put off by the disappointing outcome, for the next year she had started on a remarkably funny satire of the Gothic novel, called ‘Susan’, which was to be her first success.

  * * *

  Jane Austen became a great writer partly because she was a great reader, and had a highly developed consumer’s understanding of her favourite form. Her novels are full of books and readers: Catharine Perceval and Camilla Stanley in ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ read novels together, as do Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, Darcy is a bibliophile, and ‘always buying books’, Anne Elliot and Fanny Price, from Persuasion and Mansfield Park respectively, are passionately engaged readers of Cowper, Marianne Dashwood is devoted to recent poetry as well as to the classics, and Henry Tilney, one of the most discerning characters in any Austen novel, has read all and admires ‘most of’ Ann Radcliffe’s work.56

  Austen’s taste in reading was eclectic and guided purely by the pleasure principle. When Mrs Martin of the Maidenhead Inn was planning to open a new circulating library in the Steventon area, Jane was one of the people she wrote to as a likely subscriber, mentioning, as an inducement, that ‘her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature &c &c’. ‘She might have spared this pretension to our family,’ Jane reflected, ‘but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers.’57 Mrs Martin should perhaps have attended more closely to the tastes of her clientele, for she went out of business within a couple of years, presumably from not stocking enough novels in her library.

  There was a circulating library in Alton, and another in Basingstoke, but provincial establishments of the kind were not very large, with stock ranging on average between three hundred to a thousand books only. Austen increased her access to new publications through her membership of reading societies in Steventon and later in Chawton – the original ‘Jane Austen Book Clubs’. The societies worked by subscription: members chose the books to be purchased, and titles were rotated round the group, with everyone expected to read (or at least house for a fortnight) each other’s ‘picks’. The rules were strict: there were penalties for keeping a book beyond the agreed date and the stock was monitored jealously, ‘every smudge, burn and candlewax blot carefully recorded and charged for’, according to the historian William St Clair.58 Later in her life, Austen was proud of the book club she helped run in Chawton, and on hearing that the Miss Sibleys of West Meon wanted to establish one ‘like ours’ wrote to her sister, ‘What
can be a stronger proof of that superiority in ours over the Steventon & Manydown Society, which I have always foreseen & felt? – No emulation of the kind was ever inspired by their proceedings.’59

  Austen knew that her own works were as good as, if not a great deal better than, most of the titles in the circulating library, and everything suggests that she both hoped and expected to see one of her novels in print some day. Quite how she would square her ambitions and talent with the conventional requirements of middle-class female life was not so clear. The situation at Steventon Rectory in the late 1790s was very different from a decade earlier. The brothers had all left, there were no more pupil-boarders, Reverend Austen was in his late sixties, and he and his wife were thinking about retirement. Three of their sons had married: James for the second time, in 1795, after the sudden death of his first wife (he had one child from each marriage at this date, Anna and James Edward), Henry to his widowed cousin Eliza, and Edward, now a landed gentleman in Kent, to Elizabeth Bridges, with whom he already had five children. Cassandra and Jane, good-looking, clever and lively young women, were naturally expected to marry as well. Cassandra had been engaged since 1795 to one of her father’s former pupils and a family friend, Tom Fowle, who was waiting for an appointment to a suitably lucrative clerical living, in the gift of a patron with property in Shropshire.

  Mrs Austen wrote to her prospective daughter-in-law Mary in 1796, ‘I look forwards to you as a real comfort to me in my old age, when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire, & Jane – the Lord knows where.’60 Mrs Austen’s somewhat impatient bemusement over her younger daughter’s future prospects suggest Jane’s difference from the norm, but being a professional writer was certainly not one of the options being canvassed for her: marriage was the expected course for any dependent woman, and Jane’s suitors had not yet been very promising. Charming Tom Lefroy, Mrs Lefroy’s nephew, came and flirted and went away again; the young cleric Samuel Blackhall hovered around, suggesting he might be about to fall in love, Jane dallied and danced with her brothers’ friends and her cousins and worked up crushes to entertain herself and her girlfriends, but none of it seemed serious. Their former neighbour Mrs Mitford recalled Jane at this period in her life as ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembered’,61 enforcing the idea that an act was being put on. Jane had always emulated her elder sister, prompting their mother’s remark that ‘if Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off, Jane would have her’s cut off too’.62 Cassandra was engaged to be married and would soon leave home. Jane probably thought she had better make steps, or at least gestures, in the same direction.

  Cassandra’s engagement came to a tragic end in the spring of 1797 when her fiancé died of yellow fever while serving as chaplain on a voyage to the West Indies. Though Cassandra was still very young, she entered what Carol Shields has described as a ‘symbolic widowhood’ at Fowle’s death and seems to have resolved to live in retirement and spinsterhood. Although the possibility of marriage was not over for Jane (and she was to come very near it in 1802), the pull to do as Cassandra did now worked in the opposite direction.

  Although many commentators claim that Jane Austen was so traumatised by moving house in 1801 that she was unable to settle to writing for eight years, no one has pointed out that during the far more testing year of 1797, with the household in turmoil over Cassandra’s bereavement, Jane completed in a matter of months the first version of one of the most cheerful and cheering books in the English language. Though Cadell hadn’t wanted to read ‘First Impressions’, it was enough of a hit among those who did read it to gratify the author deeply. Cassandra requested the manuscript so often that Jane could tease her, ‘I do not wonder at your wanting to read first impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, & that so long ago,’63 and their friend Martha Lloyd was almost as ardent. In the summer of 1799 Jane joked about not re-lending it to her; ‘I would not let Martha read First Impressions again upon any account, & am very glad that I did not leave it in your power. – She is very cunning, but I see through her design; – she means to publish it from Memory, & one more perusal must enable her to do it.’64 It’s a confident joke, displaying satisfaction with the quality of her own work and its chances of appearing in public soon. Jane was in Bath at the time and had the manuscript with her; she seems to have been intending to work on it during her stay – and perhaps on other stories too.

  But, devastatingly, the next year someone else did publish a novel called First Impressions, a poet and dramatist called Margaret Holford.65 The appearance of this rival didn’t simply mean that Jane would need to change the title of her own novel – a relatively easy procedure – but that she was being beaten in a race which she hadn’t yet been able to join. The manuscripts were beginning to pile up in the sisters’ shared sitting-room at Steventon: in 1799 she finished ‘Susan’, her brilliant story satirising the books and reading habits of the 1790s. But the 1790s were closing, and the novel, for all its amazing originality, ran the risk in all topical satire of built-in obsolescence.

  At the turn of the century, Austen was twenty-five years old, unmarried, unpublished and unsure if there was any future in her highly individual style of writing. She had the manuscripts of the early versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey sitting on a shelf in her room, where, for all she knew, they would remain till doomsday, taken down every now and then and laughed over by Cassandra, or Martha, or one of the sisters-in-law, but that would be all.

  Frustrating though this must have been for the author, the benefit to posterity could hardly have been greater. If Thomas Cadell had asked to read ‘First Impressions’, he would very likely have published it; it would have been followed to the press by ‘Elinor and Marianne’, and then – goodness knows what, but certainly not the novels for which Austen is now so famous and loved. The longer Austen remained unpublished, the more experimental she became, and the more licence she assumed with bold, brilliant moves. These are particularly characteristic of the novel written deepest in her obscurity, as it were, ‘Susan’ (later Northanger Abbey), with its authorial interjection about how we must be near the denouement of the love story, as the number of pages remaining are so few, and the passage where the heroine and her friend take a break from the ardours of the plot in order to read novels:

  Yes, novels; – for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding – joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? 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 …. ‘And what are you reading, Miss –?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. – ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, 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.66

  It would take another hundred and seventy years or so before this could be described as ‘postmodern’: even today, amour-propre about the limits of realism keeps characters in soap operas away from their television sets and the residents of Ambridge mysteriously i
ncapable of tuning in to Radio 4. Such touches weren’t Austen’s only innovations: no one had reproduced dialogue so naturalistically before, no one had reined in so skilfully from caricature to character, no one had been as honest about female motivations, or so efficient in telling a story. As W. D. Howells remarked a century later, ‘the wonder of Jane Austen is that at a time when even the best fiction was overloaded with incident, and its types went staggering about under the attributes heaped upon them, she imagined getting on with only so much incident as would suffice to let her characters express their natures movingly or amusingly’.67Almost single-handedly, Austen moved the novel into the modern era – and did much of it before she got a single word in print.

  Notes - Chapter 1: ‘Authors too ourselves’

  1. Memoir, pp. 81–2.

  2. Braudy, p. 15.

  3. 18–19 December 1798, Letters, p. 26.

  4. Isobel Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, Copeland and McMaster, p. 190.

  5. Juvenilia, p. 180.

  6. Record, p. 64.

  7. 29–30 November 1812, Letters, p. 197.

  8. See the bibliography and notes to Selwyn, Complete Poems of James Austen.