Usually, when she was going away from home, Austen would have taken work to do, but not this time. Lyford’s prognosis was bad, and whether Jane had been told it or not, James Austen believed she was ‘well aware of her situation’.77 The family hung on every sign of a rally, and the patient herself, showing remarkable courage and fortitude, remained ‘composed and cheerful’. She became so weak that she was only able to totter around the rented rooms in College Street; for excursions she was taken out in a sedan chair. When she had the strength, she wrote letters, or dictated them, and on 15 July composed some verses on the subject of Winchester races. The speaker is St Swithun:
Oh! subjects rebellious! Oh Venta depraved
When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal! By vice you’re enslaved
You have sinned and must suffer, then farther he said …78
Margaret Anne Doody has pointed out that the second and fourth lines of this stanza break the rhyme scheme of the whole poem, which instead of gone demands dead. Perhaps Jane Austen couldn’t say the word – or more likely, Cassandra couldn’t write it.79 ‘Behold me immortal!’, presumably underlined by Cassandra at a later date, seemed prophetic, for these unexceptional comic verses were the last thing Jane Austen ever wrote. Two days after composing them, she was dead.
Notes - Chapter 2: Praise and Pewter
1. Memoir, p. 106.
2. Letters, p. 289.
3. MS Morgan, 2911.
4. For details of the 1800 pamphlet, see Gilson, item L3, and Laura M. Ragg, Jane Austen in Bath.
5. See Memoir, p. 105 and n. and Gilson, p. 83.
6. Letters, p. 174 and CR, vol. 5, pp. 78–83.
7. Letters, p. 182.
8. 24 January 1809, Letters, p. 169.
9. Letters, p. 174.
10. ibid., p. 175.
11. Sutherland, p. 147.
12. Memoir, p. 149.
13. Letters, p. 202.
14. ibid., p. 182.
15. ibid., p. 186.
16. Record, p. 188.
17. CH, vol.1, p.35.
18. Aspinall, p. 26.
19. ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park: collected and transcribed by Jane Austen’, CH, vol. 1, p. 51
20. Record, p. 191.
21. Letters, p. 217.
22. Complete Poems, p. 39.
23. ‘Lines written at Steventon in the Autumn of 1814, after refusing to exchange that Living for Marsh Gibbon in the borders of Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire’, Complete Poems, p. 71.
24. Letters, p. 121.
25. ibid., p. 76.
26. Cooper (1815), pp. 262–3
27. Letters, p. 322.
28. Memoir, p. 27.
29. 29 January 1813, Letters, p. 202.
30. 29–30 November 1812, Letters, p. 179.
31. Letters, p. 217.
32. 29 January 1813, Letters, p. 201.
33. For data here, see St Clair, appendix 1, and Jan Fergus, ‘The professional woman writer’, in Copeland and McMaster, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.
34. Letters, p. 201.
35. Le Faye, Fanny Knight’s Diaries, p. 25.
36. 24 May 1813, Letters, pp. 212–13.
37. MS British Library, add. ms 41253, f. 17.
38. CH, vol. 1, p. 8.
39. ibid., pp. 42, 46–7.
40. Letters, p. 213.
41. Tomalin, p. 238.
42. MS British Library, add. ms 41253, f. 19.
43. 25 September 1813, Letters, p. 231.
44. ibid., p. 250.
45. 3–6 July 1813, Letters, p. 217.
46. ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park’, CH, vol. 1, p. 50.
47. See Jan Fergus, in Copeland and McMaster, p. 23.
48. Letters, pp. 281 and 282.
49. Austen-Leigh, Fugitive Pieces, p. 27.
50. Letters, p. 281.
51. Fairweather, p. 419.
52. ibid., p. 420.
53. Miss Mitford’s grandfather, Dr Russell, was vicar of Ashe until his death in 1783.
54. Mary Russell Mitford to Sir William Elford, 3 April 1815, L’Estrange, pp. 305–6.
55. Miss Mitford doesn’t specify who the mutual friend who visited Austen was. Her mother’s testimony about the ‘husbandhunting butterfly’ is often called into doubt because she moved away from Ashe in 1783, but as she went only ten or twelve miles away from Steventon to Alresford, which is about eight miles from Chawton, it seems likely Mrs Mitford heard almost as much of the Austens as before.
56. There is a reference in a letter of 11–12 October 1813 to naming a heroine after an acquaintance called Charlotte, the name of Sanditon’s heroine, and the month before, JA had been describing the hypochondriac Mrs Bridges in terms very redolent of Diana Parker in Sanditon (Letters, p. 231).
57. Smiles, pp. 281–3.
58. Letters, pp. 293–4.
59. ibid., p. 291.
60. ibid., p. 297.
61. ibid., p. 306.
62. ibid., p. 307.
63. ‘Plan of a Novel’, MW, p. 430.
64. CH, vol. 1, p. 56.
65. Letters, p. 302.
66. CR, vol. 4, p. 407.
67. CH, vol. 1, p. 63.
68. Letters, p. 313.
69. ibid., p. 312.
70.31 December 1815, Letters, p. 309.
71. Letters, p. 313.
72. Letters, p. 333.
73. Southam (2001), p. 86.
74. Letters, p. 166.
75. ibid., p. 333.
76. Cecil (1978), p. 183.
77. James Austen to James Edward Austen, Tucker, p. 111.
78. Berg MS 209715B, as quoted in Doody, p. 246, with textual note on p. 282.
79. It has been amended to ‘dead’ in the tidied-up version, written out later by James Austen. See Margaret Anne Doody’s discussion of this manuscript in the introduction to Catharine and Other Writings, p. xxi, also David Selwyn’s textual and explanatory notes in Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family.
CHAPTER 3
Mouldering in the Grave
‘What a terrible loss!’ Mary Russell Mitford wrote to her friend Sir William Elford on 13 September 1817; ‘Are you quite sure that it is our Miss Austen?’1
Jane was the first of George and Cassandra Austen’s eight children to die. She was aged only forty-one. The funeral took place on 24 July in Winchester, the family having been granted permission by the Bishop to have her buried in the north aisle of the cathedral. Her only mourners were Henry, Edward, Frank and young James Edward Austen, who rode over from Steventon to represent his father. James felt too ill to attend.
The death notice that appeared in the Courier on 22 July made the first public acknowledgment of Jane Austen’s authorship, naming all four novels.2 No reference to her writing appeared, however, on the memorial inscription that was later added to her black marble gravestone, which lauded ‘the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper’ with a rather generalised tribute to ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’. It would have been surprising if the family had used any more specific wording in this most permanent and formal context, but the omission seems glaring now. By the 1860s, when the first tourists sought out the writer’s grave in Winchester Cathedral, the verger had no idea what she was famous for.
At home in Steventon, James was composing a poem to his sister’s memory, which was later copied and circulated around the family ‘as a fitting tribute by the acknowledged family poet’.3 ‘Venta! within thy sacred fane’ begins with a grandiloquent evocation of the cathedral, now the final resting place of the ‘Beauty, Sense & Worth’ of the poet’s late sister. Then he pays tribute to Jane’s quick fancy, warm heart and even temper, praises her rectitude as a writer and concludes with the aspect of his sister’s character he judged the most important, her fulfilment of duties to home and family:
But to her family alone
Her real & genuine worth was known:
Yes! They wh
ose lot it was to prove
Her Sisterly, her Filial love,
They saw her ready still to share
The labours of domestic care
As if their prejudice to shame;
Who, jealous of fair female fame
Maintain, that literary taste
In woman’s mind is much displaced;
Inflames their vanity and pride,
And draws from useful works aside.4
Useful works around the house were not neglected by Jane Austen, for all her indulgence of ‘literary taste’. She paid her dues to the status quo. But James’s wording is interesting. ‘As if their prejudice to shame’ implies that Jane’s dutifulness was strategic. And who were ‘they’ whose latent prejudice and jealousy of ‘fair female fame’ Austen strove to head off, if not members of her own family?
There is an interesting flash of candour in the middle of this otherwise conventional poem, when James is speaking of his sister’s self-regulation as a writer:
… not a word she ever pen’d
Which hurt the feelings of a friend
And not a line she ever wrote
‘Which dying she would wish to blot’ …
The poet suggests that this was all the more remarkable given the subject’s natural inclinations:
Though quick and keen her mental eye
Poor nature’s foibles to descry
And seemed for ever on the watch
Some traits of ridicule to catch.
The evocation of Jane’s vigilance over other people’s ‘traits of ridicule’ is very much in keeping with what Miss Mitford had said privately about Austen turning into ‘a poker of whom everyone is afraid’ in the years after her books began to be published. James makes his sister sound like a cat watching over a mousehole, recre-ationally malign. Subsequent family reminiscences steered well clear of anything as unflattering as this, but its appearance here, in the first of all of them, is revealing. Coming from a brother, it could seem almost too coldly objective and ‘watchful’ itself.
James Edward, James’s son, had also been moved to write a memorial verse, and also took ancient Winchester Cathedral as his starting point (he and his father were both former Wykehamists, so the site was significant to them personally). The young man was only eighteen at the time, and had just completed his first year at Exeter College, Oxford. His poem contrasted the deep private grief the family was experiencing at Jane’s loss and the happy ignorance of ordinary readers of her works:
The purple Floweret of the Vale,
Around its perfume throws,
But, though it scent the evening Gale,
We know not when it grows.
E’en so, thy Volumes to the world
Have half thy merit spread,
Yet were those graces yet unfurl’d
The Eye alone could read.
And who of all the Tribe, to whom
Thy works amusement gave,
Have felt one sorrow for thy doom,
Or know thy early grave?
[…] But we, to whom, unbidden Guests
That feast was always spread;
In private who enjoy’d thy Jests,
And in thy presence fed;
We, who the closest kindred claimed
With one so doubly dear, –
From us may fall, perchance unblamed,
One half-repining Tear.5
James Edward is much more direct about his aunt’s career than his father had been, specifying ‘thy Volumes’ and acknowledging their readership (‘the world’ allows for future readers as well). It makes James’s poem look more concerned with putting a lid on Jane’s fame than considering its continuation. However much James admired his sister’s talents, the sibling relationship, with all its undercurrents, had set her up as a sort of rival. James Edward had none of that to deal with, and his poem seems subsequently more generous and thoughtful. His distinction between what the public could ever know of his aunt (beyond what the Eye could find in her texts) and what she meant to those who habitually enjoyed the ‘feast’ of her presence makes his praise, effectively, unquantifiable. It also implies that the subject put her family first, not just in terms of doing her duty by them domestically (the aspect which James Austen managed to make sound more like the honouring of a contract than a free choice) but as the focus of her artistic efforts, the spur to her highest flights of inventiveness. Her true audience was ‘closest kindred’, and the books were only half of what she offered them. No wonder James Edward had some trouble being persuaded, almost fifty years later, to become his aunt’s first biographer.
In 1817, the idea of such a biography, like the idea of Jane leaving any artistic legacy, was unimaginable. Compared with the global fame of Scott and Byron, Austen’s little group of admirers and sales of a few thousand copies were negligible, and although plenty of her readers had declared themselves delighted, no one yet seemed moved to consider her novels as more than light entertainment for the current day, and as unlikely as any to survive (with one notable exception in 1818, as we shall see). Her fame seemed temporary and localised, most of all among members of her own family, who had been much more used to Jane being an unpublished writer than a published one. Her early death made her years of success seem like a short episode in a much patchier story of effort and rejection, and, in her mother’s eyes at least, she never displaced James as the child blessed with literary gifts. After James died in 1819, without having published a single poem in his lifetime, his mother wrote to her sister-in-law, Mrs Leigh Perrot, of the ‘Classical Knowledge, Literary Taste and the power of Elegant Composition’ which ‘my dear James… possessed to the highest degree’.6 This was something of a diversion from the subject of her letter, which was the earning potential of Mrs Austen’s remaining sons, but she was never diverted enough to mention her late daughter’s ‘power of Elegant Composition’, even in passing.
As a single woman in possession of no fortune to speak of, Jane Austen’s material estate was easily dispersed. She had drawn up a will three months before her death, leaving everything she owned to ‘my dearest Sister Cassandra Elizth’,7 with a £50 bequest to Henry’s former housekeeper, Madame Bigeon (who had lost savings in the collapse of Henry’s bank), and £50 to Henry, probably on the understanding that he would help Cassandra to manage and pay for any outstanding publishing business. In the months before she died, Jane had also been making a list of her profits from writing, which amounted to almost £700 (£600 of which was prudently invested in the Navy Fives). At her death, she was owed another £90 or so by John Murray.
Among the papers which Cassandra inherited (about which she knew so much more than anyone else) were the two manuscript novels, ‘Susan’ (which Jane had renamed ‘Catherine’) and ‘The Elliots’. Though there is no indication that Austen was negotiating the publication of either book in the last year of her life, or that she even considered them completely finished, they were both immediately sent to Murray, who paid £500 to publish on commission. ‘Susan’/‘Catherine’, now retitled Northanger Abbey, and ‘The Elliots’, now Persuasion, were shorter novels than the four Austen had seen through the press in her lifetime, and would appear together as a four-volume work, with a biographical preface announcing the author’s identity and death and giving an outline of her life all in one package. It was a ‘wrapping-up’ operation, a closing of the account, done at a speed which indicates that Cassandra and Henry were as keen to finish with the business of their sister’s authorship as any other executorial matter.
Murray mentioned the books to Lord Byron as forthcoming titles on his list less than two months after the author’s death: ‘Two new novels left by Miss Austen – the ingenious Author of Pride & Prejudice – who I am sorry to say died about 6 weeks ago.’8 When the joint edition appeared at the very end of the year, these two extremely different books, yoked together for years through the accident of posthumous publication, were reviewed as if in competition with each other, and as a result neith
er was really given its due. And not surprisingly, the novels themselves got less attention than the biographical notice, revealing the melancholy fact that the author had died, and that she had not been Lady Boringdon or Elizabeth Hamilton or Mrs Dorset or Augusta Paget but an unmarried parson’s daughter from Hampshire.
Henry’s note is full of the ‘warmth of Brotherly vanity & love’9 that made him such a poor custodian of his sister’s secrets during her lifetime, now tempered with his deep sadness at her loss. His provision of some personal details about the author was not, he made clear, to satisfy the vulgar curiosity of the reading public, but to draw a line under her life and work, to put an end to curiosity. He is able to reveal her identity at last – no longer ‘the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, etc’ but ‘Jane Austen’ – only because the story is over, or, as he puts it, only because the hand that guided her pen ‘is now mouldering in the grave’.
‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer,’ Henry continued briskly; ‘a life of usefulness, literature and religion, was not by any means a life of event’. Indeed, it was a bit of a poser, describing that eventless life, and Henry, like James in his memorial poem, had to fall back on his sister’s qualifications as a conventional, domesticated female, full of ‘cheerfulness, sensibility and benevolence’, modestly competent at music, dancing and drawing, satisfied with her lot, happy in her family life, and who never had a bad word to say about anyone. Henry edged rather uneasily around the issue (a glaring one for female writers of the time, and the main inhibition behind the convention of anonymity) of how this refined and pious female could have understood worldly matters well enough to represent them so acutely in her fiction. ‘Though the frailities, foibles and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection, yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness,’ he said, nervously rushing on into hyperbole. ‘Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget … Where extenuation was impossible, she had a sure refuge in silence.’ What kind of silence that might have been, Henry naturally didn’t specify.
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