Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  The same day that the book arrived at Chawton, Austen and her mother tested it out on their unsuspecting neighbour, Mary Benn:

  we set fairly at it & read half the 1st vol. to her – prefacing that having intelligence from Henry that such a work wd soon appear we had desired him to send it whenever it came out – & I beleive it passed with her unsuspected. – She was amused, poor soul! that she cd not help you know, with two such people to lead the way; but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.34

  The copy sent to Godmersham was read immediately by Fanny Knight and her friend Mary Oxenden, who scribbled in Fanny’s diary, ‘This morning we finished “Pride & Prejudice” … perfection!!!’35 Cassandra sent on their praise from Kent, which for Jane came at an opportune moment: in Chawton with only Miss Benn as audience and Mrs Austen gabbling her part of the reading, Jane had ‘had some fits of disgust’ about the book. ‘Upon the whole however I am quite vain enough & well satisfied enough,’ she wrote, facetiously suggesting some of the ways in which the book might be improved, and have its sparkle tamped down a bit. Thanks to the local Reading Society, Chawton was awash with books and readers, and word was already circulating about the new novel ‘By the Author of “Sense and Sensibility”’. Mrs Digweed called at the cottage with Miss Benn one morning and mentioned the book, though of course neither of them had any idea whom they were talking to.

  It was an ‘agreable surprise’ to Jane that her secret was being guarded cautiously in Steventon by James and his wife, but no surprise at all that several of Henry’s London friends had got to hear of it. On a visit to him that spring, she was told that one of them, a Miss Burdett, wished particularly to be introduced. ‘I am rather frightened by hearing that she wishes to be introduced to me,’ she wrote at this first evidence of lionisation: ‘If I am a wild Beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.’36 Austen had little idea how much impression Pride and Prejudice was making on its first readers. At a dinner party at the brewer Samuel Whitbread’s house in the year of publication, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan turned to his neighbour and asked if she had seen the novel, urging her to ‘buy it immediately, for it was one of the cleverest things he ever read’.37 The young lady was a Miss Shirreff, who took the great man’s advice and subsequently became such an admirer of Austen’s work that she used to hope for a carriage breakdown every time she passed through Chawton in order to contrive acquaintance with the authoress, whose cottage (as she must have discovered) was right on the corner of the busy Alton to Winchester road. Miss Shirreff was Austen’s first obsessive fan.

  Another early reader, Annabella Milbanke, wrote to her mother that she considered Pride and Prejudice ‘a very superior work’:

  It depends not on any of the common resources of novel writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs and parrots, nor chambermaids and milliners, nor rencontres and disguises.38

  She thought it the ‘most probable’ fiction she had ever read, and felt that ‘the interest is very strong, especially for Mr Darcy’. Miss Milbanke had identified Austen’s most unusual quality in a market suffused with sensational literature; that she could arouse the reader’s ‘strong interest’ without gimmickry. Miss Milbanke’s remark about the novel’s hero is also, I believe, the first recorded instance of a condition which has gripped millions of other ‘fair readers’ since: Darcy-philia. Austen’s astonishingly powerful creation of the supreme bourgeois fantasy man, aristocratic, handsome, heterosexual and possessed of Pemberley, rather gave the lie to the novel’s ostensible anti-romanticism, as Miss Milbanke (who the very next year was courted by and accepted England’s most wanted bachelor, Lord Byron) must have appreciated at many levels. Pride and Prejudice strove to be ‘probable’, but in the service of erotic and materialist dreaming.

  The novel attracted two reviews, from the same sources as before. The British Critic thought the book ‘far superior to almost all the publications of the same kind which have lately come before us’, and praised the simplicity of the plot and complexity of the characters. The Critical Review, at much greater length, told the whole plot and quoted copiously, chuckled over the characterisation of Mr Bennet and Mr Collins (‘indeed a notable object’) and flatteringly likened Elizabeth Bennet to Shakespeare’s Beatrice. This reviewer had guessed or heard the sex of the author, and seemed surprised – not to say amazed – at the intelligence she displayed and ‘the lively manner’ in which the heroine ‘supports an argument’. Altogether he felt ‘this performance … rises very superior to any novel we have lately met with in the delineation of domestic scenes’ and that the sentiments of the book ‘do great credit to the sense and sensibility of the authoress …. It is unnecessary to add, that we have perused these volumes with much satisfaction and amusement, and entertain very little doubt that their successful circulation will induce the author to similar exertions’.39

  The fact that she had sold the manuscript cheap did not in the least affect Austen’s happiness that spring and summer at the long-awaited appearance of her ‘darling child’. She was still thinking about the characters as her own private property, and was as fond of them as real people. At a watercolour exhibition in London in May, she picked out the portrait she imagined was of Jane Bennet, ‘now’ Mrs Bingley. She looked for a corresponding portrait of ‘Mrs Darcy’, but wrote to Cassandra that she was not surprised at its absence: ‘I can only imagine that Mr D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. – I can imagine he wd have that sort [of] feeling – that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy.’40 Still kept comfortably from ‘the public eye’ herself, Jane savoured the novel: when her brother Edward and his family were in Chawton that summer she read it aloud to Fanny Knight, apparently doing all the parts herself, with theatrical relish.41

  The publication of the book brought surprises for everyone: Charles Austen (along with half the nation) was busy praising Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley, at a dinner in 1814 when a young man, who turned out to be a nephew of Charles James Fox, countered with the opinion that ‘nothing had come out for years to be compared with Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility etc’.42 This must have been quite a facer for the anonymous novelist’s younger brother, but was also an obvious signal to him, and other members of the family, that there was little point and no pleasure in withholding the identity of the authoress any longer. Henry certainly had no qualms about it. On a visit to Scotland, he heard Lady Robert Kerr warmly praising Pride and Prejudice with a friend and immediately blurted out that it was, in fact, the work of his own sister! Jane excused him, understanding that he was acting ‘in the warmth of his Brotherly vanity & Love’, but also knew that this wasn’t an isolated incident: ‘he, dear Creature, has set it going so much more than once’. Reporting this to Frank, who was safely away at sea, she said:

  the truth is that the Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now – & that I beleive whenever the 3d [novel] appears, I shall not even attempt to tell Lies about it. – I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can of it. People shall pay for their Knowledge if I can make them.43

  This is a remarkably hard-nosed remark, a world away from the portrait later painted by Henry Austen and James Edward Austen-Leigh of the woman who wrote only ‘for her own amusement’. Critical success was gratifying, but Austen also coveted sales dearly. She also enjoyed the idea of fame enough to joke that her own picture might yet appear at the Royal Academy annual exhibition, along with the other beauties and celebrities of the year, ‘all white & red, with my Head on one Side’, as she wrote to Cassandra; ‘or perhaps I may marry young Mr D’arblay’,44 Fanny Burney’s nineteen-year-old son, then a student at Cambridge.

  Five months after the appearance of Pride and Prejudice, she had Mansfield Park ready to pub
lish, ‘which I hope on the credit of P.&P. will sell well, tho’ not half so entertaining’.45 As Austen’s first contemporary book, not using material generated in her teens and early twenties, Mansfield Park was also something of a leap in the dark for the thirty-seven-year-old author. The themes – of neglectful parenting, bad ministering, sexual transgression and the dubious origins of many a good man’s gains – were much more sombre than before, and the stifled central character, Fanny Price, quite a challenge to readers just getting used to the charms of the Dashwood sisters and Elizabeth Bennet. Fanny Price, with her blushes and scruples, has always been the least popular of Austen’s heroines, though she suited the more stringent moralism of the 1810s and the reaction against upper-class vice (personified by the lax new Prince Regent). Thomas Egerton thought the book had ‘no weak parts’46 but didn’t offer to buy the copyright this time, publishing on commission again in May 1814. The further economies evident in the production of Mansfield Park – even thinner paper than Pride and Prejudice, and even more lines to the page – reflected the steeply increasing price of book production during the long war years, but may have been ordered by the author in emulation of Egerton’s own practices, to maximise profits. In business terms, Mansfield Park was Austen’s most successful venture, and the invested profits from it gave her an income of about £30 a year.47

  Austen had engaged the help of Cassandra, Henry, Martha and Frank with minor queries during the writing of Mansfield Park, and seemed to enjoy a collaborative or conspiratorial element in its composition; she also enjoyed having made an impression on her older nieces in Godmersham, and, as one of the excluded younger nieces recalled later, used to shut herself up in a bedroom with them and read the current work in progress aloud. Austen kept a record of ‘Opinions’ of the novel – many of which had been solicited from, rather than volunteered by, her family and friends – which shows just how large a group the ‘insiders’ now made. The compilation of this record is itself a mark of the author’s pride in her achievement and deep interest in its reception, as she wrote to Fanny Knight: ‘The pleasures of Vanity are … within your comprehension & you will enter into mine, at receiving the praise which every now & then comes to me, through some channel or other.’ To her niece Anna she wrote, ‘Make everybody at Hendon admire Mansfield Park.’48

  While the ‘Opinions’ contain many expressions of delight from family and friends, some seem to have been preserved as examples of the crass things nearest and dearest feel licensed, or even obliged, to say to one of their own who has attracted praise elsewhere. Mrs Austen thought the heroine insipid; Anna ‘could not bear’ her; Mrs Cooke liked the treatment of clergy, but ‘wished for a good Matronly Character’; Mrs Sophia Lefroy ‘liked it, but thought it a mere novel’. There were rather unaccountable identifications (one lady chose to see herself in Lady Bertram) and appalling rudeness too, such as Mrs Augusta Bramstone taking the opportunity to say that she thought Jane’s first two novels had been ‘downright nonsense’, but ‘expected to like Mansfield Park better, & having finished the Ist vol. – flattered herself she had got through the worst’. The book was constantly held up for comparison with Pride and Prejudice, and found wanting in liveliness, but superior in morality.

  So there was not much danger of Jane Austen getting above herself at home. Her family seemed full of experts on fiction, and a new generation of writers was springing up at her feet; in 1814 Anna Austen admitted that she, too, was writing a novel, and sent it in batches to be read and commented on by her aunts. Anna’s young half-sister Caroline was also writing and sending stories for commentary, and James Edward, about to go up to Oxford, was busy writing poems and sketches. James Edward was a much more frequent correspondent after he discovered, three novels into her career, that he ‘had the honour to have a relation/Whose works were dispersed through the whole of the nation’. The witty verses he sent her on the occasion marvelled at the fact:

  That you made the Middletons, Dashwoods & all,

  And that you, (not young Ferrars,) found out that a ball

  May be given in cottages never so small

  And though Mr Collins so grateful for all

  Will Lady de Burgh his dear patroness call,

  Tis to your ingenuity really he ow’d

  His living, his wife, & his humble abode.49

  Sales of Mansfield Park were enough to raise the prospect of a second edition, of which Austen told her niece, ‘I am very greedy & want to make the most of it.’50 But perhaps Henry asked too much from Egerton, as the idea seems to have died on the vine. Moving as he did in far more wealthy and worldly circles than his sister, Henry was keen for her to maximise her celebrity and take whatever opportunities arose to mingle with wits and the literati. Madame de Staël was in London that year and had borrowed a copy of Pride and Prejudice from Henry Colburn, and although privately she pronounced Austen’s novels ‘vulgaire’,51 she was interested in meeting the author. Austen firmly dead-batted the suggestion. Nothing was less likely than she would enjoy the company of the great French novelist, with her famously big personality, thick skin and loud voice, from whose eloquence Byron said ‘the sovereign himself … was not exempt’.52 Austen was far too satirical to insert herself into such a scene.

  A very interesting view of how fame affected Jane Austen in the few years she was granted it comes from the novelist and playwright Mary Russell Mitford, another local parson’s daughter, twelve years Austen’s junior and brought up in nearby Alresford.53 Miss Mitford was delighted to discover, in 1815, that the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice etc’ was someone her mother had known as a girl. She also heard this gossip about Austen from an unnamed mutual acquaintance, suggesting that Austen’s behaviour in front of strangers had modified dramatically now that she was a figure of interest:

  a friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that, till ‘Pride and Prejudice’ showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a firescreen, or any other thin upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now; she is still a poker – but a poker of whom every one is afraid. It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is rather formidable. Most writers are good-humoured chatterers – neither very wise nor very witty: – but nine times out of ten (at least in the very few that I have known) unaffected and pleasant, and quite removing by their conversation any awe that may have been excited by their works. But a wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk, is terrific indeed!54

  The specific linking of this terrific new social power to Austen’s debut as a published writer says a lot about how she decided to conduct her fame. ‘A poker of whom every one is afraid’ could have been a useful mode to adopt when faced with impertinent gawpers, though the impression here is of Austen being actively unpleasant to her admirers rather than simply trying to protect her own privacy. ‘Nine times out of ten’ a writer in such a position would make an effort to put people at their ease. But not Jane Austen.55

  * * *

  Despite some doubts about how long her inspiration could go on, Austen now thought of herself as a full-time novelist, and the five years from 1811 to 1816 were an almost constant round of writing, revising, correcting proofs and getting published. She finished ‘Mansfield Park’ in June 1813 and was perhaps planning an early version of ‘Sanditon’ that autumn.56 Egerton brought out second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice late in 1813, and in January 1814 Jane began ‘Emma’, finishing the book within fourteen months. In May 1814, Mansfield Park was published; Emma was published the next year, ‘Persuasion’ started and the long-neglected ‘Susan’ retrieved from Crosby and revised.

  Austen got the chance to show her hand as a businesswoman when Henry was taken ill during the negotiations over the sale of her new novel, Emm
a, towards the end of 1815. They had made the decision to leave Egerton and offer the book to John Murray, the most prestigious and fashionable literary publisher of the day. Murray’s desk in Albemarle Street was groaning with submissions from novelists and poets who sought ‘the honour of the name of Lord Byron’s publisher on the title-page’, as Samuel Smiles wrote at the end of the century,57 so his prompt interest in Austen was very much a mark of distinction. Murray wanted to buy the copyrights to all three available titles, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma, but the £450 he was offering was dismissed by Henry rather haughtily:

  The Terms you offer are so very inferior to what we had expected, that I am apprehensive of having made some great Error in my Arithmetical Calculation. – On the subject of the expence & profit of publishing, you must be much better informed than I am; – but Documents in my possession appear to prove that the Sum offered … is not equal to the Money which my Sister has actually cleared by one very moderate Edition of Mansfield Park … & a still smaller one of Sense & Sensibility.58

  Jane must have approved the letter, and possibly composed much of it, as it was dictated to her from Henry’s sickbed, but when his illness worsened sharply, and the family rushed to London to help, Jane had to continue the negotiations on her own. She had no trouble with this, writing under her own name to arrange a meeting with Murray at Henry’s house in Hans Place. Neither was she intimidated by the great man, whom she judged ‘a Rogue of course but a civil one’.59 She was right to think ‘it will end in my publishing for myself, I dare say’; Austen hung on to the copyrights and Murray published Emma on commission, in an edition of 2,000 (much larger than Egerton had ever ventured), and reissued Mansfield Park. The printing progressed with a speed almost unimaginable in the industry now, and within three weeks, Austen felt justified in sending an irritable letter complaining about delays with the proofs: ‘Instead of the Work being ready by the end of the present month [November, 1815], it will hardly, at the rate we now proceed, be finished by the end of the next.’60 Again, the tone is that of an assertive businesswoman, not a meek amateur.