Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  In 1840, the railway came through the area, with the nearest station, at Alton, telescoping the time it took to get from Chawton to London to an almost incredible two hours. ‘People could not at first believe that coaches could be made to run without horses,’ John White recalled. Cassandra lived to see the quiet of the area disturbed in other ways too. At the height of the troubles arising from the high food prices and low wages for labourers in the 1830s, there was rioting and a wave of vandalism that included the total destruction of Selborne workhouse. The soldiery was called out to contain the violence, but it took time and some tentative promises from local farmers to increase pay. Nevertheless, Chawton was not a particularly happy or thriving community during these years and in 1841 several of the village’s young men decided to emigrate en masse to New Zealand. The move had a sad outcome, as nearly all their children died on the five-month sea voyage, perhaps among them some of the girls whom old ‘Mrs Austen’ had taken an interest in at home.63

  Cassandra in her old age was remembered as ‘a pale, dark-eyed old lady, with a high arched nose and a kind smile, dressed in a long cloak and a large drawn bonnet, both made of black satin’.64 She died aged seventy-two on a visit to her brother Frank in 1845, and was taken back to Chawton for burial at St Nicholas’s Church on a blustery day in March. Her nephew Charles Knight, who conducted the service, could hardly be heard in the churchyard above the wind, and the pall almost blew away. ‘It struck me as remarkably emblematic of her age & condition’, James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote afterwards to his sister, ‘that the wind whisked about us so many withered beech leaves, that the coffin was strewn with them before the service closed.’65

  Jane Austen’s dramatisation of scenes from Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, showing her habit of working in a series of small, hand-folded booklets.

  Jane’s father, the Revd George Austen, who did the most to encourage her early writing.

  The letter which Jane’s father sent to the publisher Thomas Cadell on 1 November 1797, offering him ‘First Impressions’. Someone at the office has written ‘declined by Return of Post’ along the top.

  The publisher John Murray at about the date when he took Jane Austen onto his prestigious list.

  A royalty cheque from Murray to ‘Miss Jane Austin’ for £38 18s 1d earned on sales of Emma in 1816.

  Austen’s persistent advisor, the Revd James Stanier Clarke, in a pastel by John Russell dating from the 1790s.

  Cassandra Austen in middle age, after the death of her beloved sister.

  Jane’s brother Henry in the 1820s. He acted as her agent during her lifetime and literary executor after her death.

  Jane Austen’s gravestone in Winchester Cathedral, which omits to mention her writing.

  The publisher Richard Bentley, whose interest in Austen saved the author from years of neglect.

  The title page of Richard Bentley’s 1833 edition of Sense and Sensibility, which got Jane Austen back into print in England for the first time since her death.

  Jane’s first biographer, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, at around the date of the Memoir’s publication, 1870.

  Austen’s devoted editor and champion Robert William Chapman in 1949, towards the end of his scholarly work on the author.

  The house in Chawton, Hampshire, that was Jane Austen’s home from 1809 until her death in 1817; a photograph taken in 1902, when the property still belonged to the Knight estate and was divided into three separate dwellings.

  Dorothy Darnell, founder of the Jane Austen Society (second right), with T. E. Carpenter (right) outside Chawton Cottage in the late 1940s.

  Notes - Chapter 3: Mouldering in the Grave

  1. L’Estrange, vol. 2, p. 13.

  2. Gilson, M5 iii, p. 470.

  3. Complete Poems, p. xi.

  4. ibid., p. 87.

  5. ‘To the Memory of Miss Jane Austen’, Austen-Leigh (2006), pp. 58–60.

  6. Austen-Leigh (1942), p. 265.

  7. Letters, p. 339.

  8. 9 September 1817, Nicholson, p. 246.

  9. Letters, p. 231.

  10. CH, vol. 1, p. 87.

  11. ibid.

  12. ibid., p. 102.

  13. ibid., pp. 100–101.

  14. P&P, p. 414.

  15. Retrospective Review, 1823, quoted in CH, vol. 1, p. 111.

  16. CH, vol. 1, p. 80 and p. 83.

  17. ibid., p. 267.

  18. Lamb, p. 177.

  19. William Hazlitt, ‘The Dandy school’, The Examiner, 18 November 1827.

  20. See David Gilson, ‘Jane Austen, the aristocracy and T. H. Lister’, Report 2002, pp. 56–65.

  21. Lister, vol. 1, p. 148.

  22. Quoted in John Gore, ‘Pride and Prejudice and Miss Eden’, CR, vol. 1, p. 134.

  23. See Mandal and Southam, p. 5.

  24. See Catharine Nepomnyashchy’s essay ‘Jane Austen in Russia: Hidden Presence and Belated Boom’ in Mandal and Southam.

  25. Hastings, p. 20.

  26. ibid., p. 21.

  27. ibid., p. 23.

  28. Henry Austen to Charles Austen, 24 November 1822, Morgan Library, MA 4500.

  29. ibid.

  30. British Library, add. ms 41253, f. 16.

  31. Austen-Leigh (1942), p. 283.

  32. ibid., p. 271.

  33. Gilson, ‘Jane Austen and John Murray’, p. 520.

  34. Dowden et al., vol. 5, p. 2003.

  35. Henry Austen to Richard Bentley, British Library, add. ms 46611, f. 311–12.

  36. Anna wrote to her half-brother James Edward Austen-Leigh in a letter postmarked 8 August 1862, ‘I would give a good deal, that is as much as I could afford, for a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her in one of their expeditions – sitting down out of doors on a hot day, with her bonnet strings untied.’ Chapman (1948), p. 213.

  37. Memoir, p. 154.

  38. Sadleir, unpaginated.

  39. Richard Bentley to Fanny Burney d’Arblay, 12 October 1835; Burney, vol. 12, p. 879n.

  40. Macaulay, p. 694

  41.14 March 1826, Scott, p. 135.

  42. Clark, p. 176 and 420. It is just as well that Sarah Harriet Burney never heard Austen’s view of her own novel, Clarentine, published in 1798. ‘We are reading Clarentine, & are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a2d reading than at the 1st & it does not bear a 3d at all’, Letters, p. 120.

  43. S&S, p. 298.

  44. Watt, p. 3.

  45. Brydges (1834), vol. 2, p. 269.

  46. Letters, p. 252.

  47. ibid., p. 5.

  48. Record, p. 101.

  49. S&S, p. 299.

  50. Letters, p. 344.

  51. Memoir, p. 198.

  52. Record, p. 241.

  53. British Library, add. ms 41253, ff. 15, 16, 17 and 19.

  54. CH, vol. 1, p. 120.

  55. Cassandra Elizabeth Austen to Charles Austen, 9 May 1843, MS Morgan 4500.

  56. Juvenilia, p. xxv.

  57. Austen (1952), p. 10.

  58. Chapman (1948), p. 67.

  59. Memoir, p. 184.

  60. Letters, p. 93.

  61. Unpublished letter in the collection of Mr Robert H. Taylor, quoted in Gilson, M66.

  62. ‘Recollections of John White’, Austen (1952), p. 20.

  63. ibid.

  64. Proudman, p. 8.

  65. Austen-Leigh (1942), p. 294.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Vexed Question

  Jane Austen’s novels were not essential reading for the high Victorians, and certainly were not ‘beloved’. She had become a half-forgotten niche-writer, with a readership that looked insignificant compared with that of Dickens, Collins and Thackeray, all selling in their hundreds of thousands to the new mass market. When the copyrights expired on Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park in 1839, 1841 and 1842 respectively, and on Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1857 and 1860, there was no rush by publishers to pick up the free texts. Bentley, unch
allenged as her main publisher, kept up with demand for Austen’s novels by ordering another 500–1,000 copies of each title every eight or ten years. The books were available, but hardly flooding the market, and the author remained ‘a critic’s novelist – highly spoken of and little read’.1 In the 1850s, G. H. Lewes complained about the number of people he met who remembered having read Austen’s novels, but who had forgotten by whom they were written: ‘“Miss Austen? Oh yes; she translates from the German, doesn’t she?”’2 And as late as 1866, Notes & Queries published a request for the name of the author of a book mentioned by Macaulay, Mansfield Park.3

  In the fifty-two years between her death and the publication of the first biography in 1870, only six essays were published on the subject of Jane Austen and she was hardly mentioned in the public sphere. James Austen’s granddaughter Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh had a rather literal explanation for the slow growth of Austen’s fame in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, blaming the smallness of the print used in the Standard Novels series, ‘ill-suited to any but young and strong eyes’.4 But Austen was being ‘overlooked’ in all sorts of ways. Though Queen Victoria recalled reading Northanger Abbey with pleasure to ‘dear Albert’, the de luxe dedication copy of Emma that had been presented to her great-uncle, the Prince Regent, in 1815 was relegated during her reign to the servants’ library, where it seems to have remained, unread, for decades. The copy probably owes its present state of good preservation to the double neglect it found below stairs, where, as Roger Fulford remarked to the Jane Austen Society in 1957, ‘we may be thankful that John Brown’s tastes were more for the cupboard than the bookshelf – the whiskey bottle rather than the novel’.5

  Alfred Tennyson was a great admirer of Austen, and perhaps the first person to satirise his devotion, saying to his host on a visit to Lyme Regis, ‘… Don’t talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth – show me the place where Louisa Musgrove fell!’ On another occasion he expressed his gratitude that so little was known about the author’s life, thanking ‘God Almighty … that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare’s or Jane Austen’s, that they had not been ripped open like pigs’.6 The Austen family had no intention of exposing their aunt to such scrutiny, of course – in fact, had no intention of engaging with the public at all. They were a widely dispersed clan, thanks to the number of children and grandchildren descending from the Austen brothers (twenty-three nephews and nieces were alive at the time of Cassandra’s death), and no one member of it had control over Aunt Jane’s papers, memory or intellectual property. Cassandra had left the most precious and intimate manuscripts, the letters, to Fanny Knight, but James’s three children, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Caroline Austen and their half-sister Anna Lefroy, had manuscript items too, and made copies, which they passed around between them. But even these close siblings weren’t aware of the extent of the whole archive, or what their cousin had at her disposal. ‘Lady Knatchbull has a whole short story they were wishing years ago to make public,’ Caroline reported to her brother in the 1860s, possibly referring to ‘Lady Susan’, ‘but [they] were discouraged by others – & I hope the desire has passed away.’7

  The question whether or not there was ‘an estate of Jane Austen’ didn’t occur to anyone until it was tested. The publication in 1850 of a novel, The Younger Sister, by Frank Austen’s daughter Catherine-Anne Hubback, caused a certain amount of consternation in the family, for it picked up and worked on the plot and characters of ‘The Watsons’, the fragmentary novel (not titled by Jane) which had been in the possession of Caroline Austen since 1845. Catherine-Anne Hubback had been born in Chawton in 1818, so never knew Jane, but she did know Cassandra well, and probably looked over the fragment, along with other papers, many times in her youth. It is perfectly possible that Catherine-Anne was encouraged by Aunt Cassandra to use it as a practice piece, just as James’s children seem to have been encouraged in earlier years to make free with the incomplete parts of Jane’s juvenilia. Anna Austen wrote a continuation of her aunt’s story ‘Evelyn’ in ‘Volume the Third’ (it is signed with her married initials, so must post-date 1814) and one editor has suggested that James Edward’s additions to the same volume could have been made as late as 1829.

  ‘The Watsons’ was, at any rate, so familiar to Catherine-Anne Hubback that she must have either made a copy of it during Cassandra’s lifetime, or simply remembered it from frequent reading, like a fulfilment of Jane’s pointed joke in 1799 about Martha Lloyd having read ‘First Impressions’ so often that ‘she means to publish it from Memory, & one more perusal must enable her to do it’.8 The opening chapters of The Younger Sister replicate names, characters and the basic family situation of Jane’s manuscript closely, and Catherine-Anne’s borrowings seem to have been limited only by the brevity of the original. No wonder it riled her older cousins, the only other people who knew about the unfinished story. They were probably also taken aback by the dedication of Catherine-Anne’s book, ‘To the Memory of her Aunt/THE LATE MISS AUSTEN’. It was quite a bold move, laying claim to an aunt Mrs Hubback had never known, and whose work she was silently recycling. The interesting relation managed to slip into the title-pages of her later novels, too, like a form of product endorsement: ‘Life and Its Lessons/By Mrs Hubback/Niece of Miss Austen’.

  Catherine-Anne Hubback’s circumstances go a little way to excuse her behaviour. She had married a barrister when she was twenty-four and had three sons by him, but when her husband suffered a breakdown only a few years later, Catherine-Anne was put in the almost impossible position, for a middle-class woman of the time, of having to support herself and her children. She proved as resourceful and resilient a parent as her father Frank had always been, and turned to novel-writing, producing nine perfectly original novels after The Younger Sister, and later emigrating to America to join two of her sons. But even if her circumstances were generally known in the family, there wasn’t much sympathy for her. Anna Lefroy, who, as a woman widowed young and left with a young family to support, might have been expected to be the most understanding, was convinced that her cousin had managed to purloin not only ‘The Watsons’ but ‘Sanditon’ during Aunt Cassandra’s lifetime, and thought her ‘pretty sure to make use of it as soon as she thinks she safely may’.9

  No one outside the family would have recognised the source material of The Younger Sister, of course, and there was still no thought, among James Austen’s children, of publishing Jane’s unfinished pieces or her juvenilia. Family members were still likely to give away a Jane Austen letter if asked nicely by individual enthusiasts; even requests that were rude or abrupt (as one from a Mechanics’ Institute in Guernsey to James Edward Austen-Leigh) could be rewarded by the gift of an autograph at least, or a manuscript reckoned to be unimportant, cut into scraps. Frank Austen kindly sent a letter from Jane to Martha Lloyd (his second wife) to a daughter of the president of Harvard, Miss Eliza Quincy, who had made her interest in Austen’s novels sound like a matter of significance for Anglo-American relations: ‘The sun, it is said, never sets on the dominions of the British Queen,’ she told Frank in 1852, ‘– but the classics of English Literature exercise a yet more permanent and extensive sway, recognised even by those sturdy republicans, who disown allegiance to any sovereign – except the sovereign people.’10 Frank was doubtless unprepared for a continuing correspondence with Miss Quincy, but the subject had animated her profoundly. ‘The electric Telegraph of Genius annihilates the barriers of Time, and Space,’ she told him of his sister on another occasion,11 an interestingly up-to-date analogy to apply to a writer not often associated with new technology.

  Apart from Jane and James, all the Austen siblings lived to great ages; even their disabled brother George, the next to die, reached seventy-two. Cassandra followed him in 1845, Henry in 1850, Charles and Edward in 1852, Frank in 1865, at the venerable age of ninety-one. While they were alive, there was no likelihood at all of any further information about Jane Austen being put before the public. The ‘Biographical Notice’
of 1818 and 1833 had said more than enough, in their opinion.

  The next generation, who by the 1860s were themselves getting old, only began to act in defence of their aunt’s memory when they felt it had become vulnerable to misinterpretation. Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, who as James Edward’s adult daughter was privy to plenty of family gossip on the subject of the first biography, recalled that ‘as curiosity grew stronger, while the family remained silent, it was not unnatural that in the absence of definite information certain erroneous ideas should be entertained, and some mistaken statements made respecting herself, her home, and her position and opportunities in life’.12 One of these ‘erroneous ideas’ was that Jane Austen had disliked children, another that she ‘was not fond of animals’. More pertinently, with the passage of time, memoirs, letters and biographies of Austen’s near-contemporaries were emerging that began to affect public perceptions of figures from the previous generation. The most influential was undoubtedly Elizabeth Gaskell’s bestselling Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, written in the immediate aftermath of the novelist’s death. Not only did the biography present Brontë as the pre-eminent female novelist of her age, but Gaskell’s pacy and highly coloured prose made the book as good as a novel itself, and the sensational life story she revealed, of the oppressed genius and her sisters trapped in their father’s gloomy moorland parsonage, had thrilled readers and quickly established a potent cult following.