Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published only ten years after the sensational debuts of the three Brontë sisters with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. These shocking novels, published under male pseudonyms but soon revealed to be the work of a parson’s daughters, easily eclipsed Austen’s steady but by no means universal renown. Worse for Austen’s reputation, Gaskell’s biography quoted letters of Charlotte Brontë that singled Austen out for far-reaching criticism. These were from the previous decade, when Brontë, in a private correspondence with G. H. Lewes, had challenged the critic’s ardent advocacy (notably more ardent than his praise of Jane Eyre). Brontë made clear her dislike for Austen and the sort of writing she represented:

  Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would have rather written ‘Pride and Prejudice’, or ‘Tom Jones’ than any of the Waverley Novels?

  I had not seen ‘Pride and Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.13

  Lewes’s reply has not survived, but can be understood from Brontë’s next letter to him:

  You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that ‘Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no “sentiment” (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’, – and then you add, I must ‘learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.’

  The last point only will I ever acknowledge.

  Can there be a great artist without poetry?14

  The rhetorical question had an undeniable resonance. Austen was certainly ‘without poetry’; she eschewed extravagant language, heightened emotions, dramatic situations and any but the sparest descriptive passages. In Brontë’s view (and Wordsworth’s), and that of many readers since, this disqualified her from a certain seriousness of attention: she was in a different, much tamer, league – one concerned with realism, restraint and understatement, all of which the younger novelist wished to challenge. Brontë was unwilling to consider that Austen’s rejection of ‘the poetic’ was not merely a symptom of primness and went deeper than temperament, experience, and her nurture in the Augustan age. Of the two writers, Austen could be said to display the more truly romantic sensibility; she saw the potency of ‘the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’ and put all her least lively heroines, Fanny Price, Charlotte Heywood and Anne Elliot, in peril of its effects. When Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon attempts to enthuse Charlotte about Scott, Wordsworth, Campbell, Montgomery and Burns (incidentally revealing how much of the new writing Austen herself was acquainted with), Charlotte’s reply starts priggishly, but ends feelingly: ‘I have read several of Burns’s Poems with delight… but I am not poetic enough to separate a Man’s Poetry entirely from his Character; & poor Burns’s known Irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his Lines. I have difficulty depending on the Truth of his Feelings as a Lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a Man of his Description: He felt & he wrote & he forgot.’15 A writer, or person, ‘with poetry’ is never entirely to be trusted, the author implies.

  The flights and transports, deliberate eloquence and enthusiasm associated with romanticism, its perpetrators and consumers are all treated with deep suspicion in Austen’s novels, not just as a temporary danger (if Marianne Dashwood had been a less appreciative reader of Shakespeare, she might not have misread Willoughby) but as a sign of a sort of spiritual incontin-ence that has to be guarded against. Only Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are never in danger of reading Burns or being entirely miserable. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot recommends ‘a larger allowance of prose in his daily study’ to Captain Benwick, like a literary high-fibre diet, and later in the book reflects that ‘it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly’.

  It is easy to guess how much Austen would have disapproved the high colouring and abandoned sensuality of the Brontë sisters’ novels. Nothing of the sort could be ‘safely enjoyed’, so its possible qualification for a kind of Greatness would have struck her as impertinent. But in 1857, it was Brontë’s view of Austen which was being quoted so disadvantageously and at such length by Mrs Gaskell, and it was Austen’s old-fashioned restraint and regulation that was being brought to readers’ notice and stuck in their minds: ‘[She] maybe is sensible, real (more real than true),’ Brontë concluded witheringly, ‘but she cannot be great.’16

  The Austen family – or at least its most interested parties: Anna Lefroy, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Caroline Austen and Cassy Esten Austen – did not at first mobilise against the sporadic assaults on their aunt’s literary reputation. They probably didn’t feel the need while an eloquent advocate such as G. H. Lewes was engaged on her behalf (by the late 1850s he had published four articles, three-quarters, that is, of all available criticism on Austen), but eventually even Lewes began to lament the dearth of biographical information about his favourite novelist: ‘Miss Austen has made herself known without making herself public. There is no portrait of her in the shop windows; indeed, no portrait of her at all.’17 Unlike Fanny Burney, whose voluminous Diaries and Letters, published between 1842 and 1846, gave readers ‘biography, and to spare’, or Brontë (who Lewes rather maliciously suggested ‘will soon cease to find readers’), nothing was known about Austen beyond the simple facts of her simple life, laid out by Henry Austen in his Biographical Notice of 1818.

  Some commentators were coming to their own conclusions about the author. Two unsigned articles in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1866 (a monthly with an enormous readership) kept returning to Austen’s unattractive ‘coolness’: ‘Jane Austen’s heart was tender, but without sentiment, and her imagination sustained, but quite cool and comfortable.’18 ‘Her love is nothing more rash than a deep attachment based on esteem, a chastened affection which does not catch fire under a thousand a year.’ The writer went on to accuse Austen of having only an ‘elegant’ morality, a lack of enthusiasm, ignorance of real life, and, worst of all, insufficient femininity: ‘Miss Austen’s brain does not seem to have any maternal love for its children: it treats them somewhat like a man of the world.’19 The idea of excessive ‘coolness’, with its close friends frigidity and death, hung round the subject, and even a long and praising chapter on Austen by Julia Kavanagh in English Women of Letters came round, in its summing-up, to Austen’s ‘cold views of life’.20

  These, or similar, remarks in the press may have been in Caroline Austen’s mind in 1869 when she expressed concern to her brother about ‘this vexed question between the Austens and the Public’,21 and how to settle it. James Edward Austen-Leigh, heir to Scarlets, author of a monograph about the Vine Hunt and retired Vicar of Bray, had, according to his daughter Mary Augusta, ‘long declined’ the suggestion that he should write a memoir of his aunt, though many friends ‘often begged him to undertake’ it. He felt, very reasonably, that his own memories were too thin, and that there was not enough documentary material to go on. Also, the public expectation of a literary biography was of a work which would enhance an already big reputation with similarly large-scale life events and revelations – such as Tom Moore’s Life of Byron in 1830, or Lockhart’s Life of Scott – or at least open up a view of the subject within a literary context, by publishing letters and diaries. As a biographical subject, Jane Austen held out no such opportunities, though that wouldn’t have deterred Macaulay, whose journal of 1854 shows
him as entranced as ever: ‘wonderful creature!’ he wrote, ‘worth all Dickens and Pliny together’. Four years later, he was still wondering what to do with his admiration: ‘If I could get materials, I really would write a short life of that wonderful woman, and raise a little money to put up a monument to her in Winchester Cathedral.’22 Had he been granted his wish, Macaulay’s phantom Life and Letters of Jane Austen would doubtless have ‘placed’ Austen very memorably in her literary and historical context – which was exactly what her family felt was unnecessary, and, moreover, what they were utterly unqualified to do themselves.

  James Edward Austen-Leigh couldn’t have contemplated undertaking a biography without the active encouragement and full co-operation of his sister and half-sister, both of whom had spent a great deal of time in their aunts’ company; Anna lived with her grandparents and aunts at Steventon between the ages of two and four (after her mother’s death), and Caroline was a frequent visitor to Chawton as a child, about fifteen years later. Jane had encouraged both, separately, with their juvenile writing and each, naturally, believed that she had been the favourite niece.

  Though Anna’s early novel, which Jane read and commented on at length in 1814, seems to have been destroyed by her in the 1820s,23 she later published another, called Mary Hamilton, and two children’s books. Anna might have been thought a good choice as biographer, but the possibility doesn’t seem to have been considered by her or anyone else. Her ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’, a manuscript of 1864, was addressed to James Edward in the form of a long letter, rather like a series of notes. ‘I am sorry that [the text] should be so meager & unsatisfactory,’ she wrote in her final paragraphs, ‘but if this attempt should incline others to do the same, even if no more, the contributions when put together may furnish a memorial of some value.’24 This indicates that in the early 1860s the family was thinking of compiling a rather informal memorial, possibly for purely home consumption, preserving the memories of people who had known Jane Austen personally before that generation died out. Even when Caroline Austen wrote her more elaborate and lengthy reminiscences in 1867, she made it clear they were written primarily for other family members, ‘and for my own gratification’.25

  By 1869, however, the project had changed completely. The siblings had now decided on a conventional memoir, for trade publication, synthesising the available family reminiscences and written by James Edward, the current head of the family. The ‘vexed question between the Austens and the Public’ would be answered, and duty done. James Edward’s Memoir of Jane Austen, composed and published with great dispatch in 1869, remains the main source of biographical information, incorporating family reminiscences, extracts from letters and anecdotes about Austen’s life as a writer, which, combined with Austen-Leigh’s saccharine portrait of his aunt – ‘there was scarcely a charm in her most delightful characters that was not a true reflection of her own sweet temper and loving heart’ – established at a stroke the highly popular and durable cult of Jane Austen’s sweetness and gentility.

  Correspondence between James Edward and his siblings about the proposed biography shows how keenly Anna and Caroline racked their brains for extra material, refined their stories and encouraged their brother towards a speedy conclusion of his task. He certainly had his work cut out, trying to make Jane Austen’s quiet life look interesting, and, unlike his late uncle, Henry Austen, had relatively little intimate knowledge to draw on. Henry could have painted an extremely full portrait of the subject, had he wished; James Edward never. The epigraph he chose for his book, from a life of Christopher Columbus, suggests James Edward’s own view of himself as biographer, launching out, with jaw set and teeth gritted, towards terra incognita: ‘He knew of no one but himself who was inclined to the work. This is no uncommon motive. A man sees something to be done, knows of no one who will do it but himself, and so is driven to the enterprise.’26

  James Edward had access to the handful of letters from his aunt to his sisters and himself, but no sight of Fanny Knatchbull’s hoard; he was able to see copies of ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’, but not, at first, ‘Lady Susan’; the volumes of juvenilia (of which he owned ‘Volume the Third’) were similarly dispersed. Frank Austen, the last of his generation, died in 1865, too late to be asked for material, and all the letters from Jane to Frank’s first wife Mary, which he had kept carefully all that time, were destroyed by one of his daughters soon after his death. Uncle Henry’s store of letters, too, had been lost or thrown away. James Edward had no idea of the number of letters that had been left to Lady Knatchbull, and certainly no idea of their content. Anna Lefroy didn’t even know of their existence until the memoir project was almost complete, having presumed ‘as a matter of course’ that Aunt Cassandra had destroyed all such personal manuscripts.27

  Caroline was an invaluable assistant, as she had – besides her own rich memories – plenty of stories about Jane from her parents (her mother, the former Mary Lloyd, had known the Austens from girlhood), and was well informed about memorabilia, sending James Edward a copy of a rather remarkable survival, George Austen’s letter to Cadell, which had been bought in a sale of the publisher’s papers by Tom Lefroy’s nephew. This younger Tom Lefroy was married to Jemima, Anna Lefroy’s daughter and great-niece of Jane, so he had plenty of reason to be interested in the letter, though it seems surprising that he even got to hear of the sale, at a date when the concept of ‘Austen memorabilia’ barely existed. His interest seems to have been quickened by conversations he had had with his ancient uncle, now retired Chief Justice of Ireland, who told him that he had indeed been in love with Jane Austen in the 1790s, but that it had been ‘a boyish love’.28 This information was surely solicited from the old man rather than volunteered, and wasn’t passed on by the younger Tom to James Edward until after the publication of the Memoir. There is a suggestion here of the younger Tom Lefroy pursuing his own agenda, perhaps out of sheer curiosity. But until James Edward’s Memoir was published, there were no clear channels into which such information could run. There was no ‘estate’, and no single heir. Very many anecdotes and reminiscences about Austen must have been lost.

  Gathering of material brought relatively little to light, and makes one wonder at how quick Austen’s family had been to throw away her letters. None survives from Jane to either parent, to James, Edward or Henry (a great loss, one imagines, given Henry’s liveliness and particular interest in the publication of the novels). Caroline Austen testified that her aunt ‘wrote very fully to her Brothers when they were at sea, and she corresponded with many others of her family’,29 but only six letters to Frank himself remain, only one to Charles. No letters to her brothers’ wives have survived; Fanny Sophia, Frank’s youngest daughter, is known to have destroyed the letters from Jane to her mother, Mary Gibson, but what of the many intimate letters which Martha, her stepmother, must have received from the novelist, some of which must have still been around in the early 1850s when Frank sent the one to Miss Quincy as a keepsake? It shows Cassandra’s hoarding of around ninety to herself as the act of pious commemoration it was, rather than the act of vandalism it is sometimes represented to be.

  James Edward had been on a visit to the site of Steventon Rectory (his own childhood home as well as that of Jane Austen), only to find ‘traces of former things … even more obliterated than I had expected. Even the terrace has been levelled, & its site is to be distinguished only by the finer turf on that place.’30 It was similarly tricky trying to find dates and documents: ‘I am sure you will do justice to what there is,’ Caroline wrote to him, ‘but I feel it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of our sight by the past generat [ion].’31 She had suggestions for various bits of ‘stuffing’ for the book – some of Jane’s light verse could be included, perhaps, or some carefully chosen items from the juvenilia. Of these, she favoured the more nonsensical writings, like ‘Evelyn’, the longest and latest of the teenaged Jane’s sallies into the ab
surd (in which the obnoxious Mr Gower is instantly given everything he wants by the strangers he lands on in the charmed village of the title). Caroline seems to have suggested ‘Evelyn’ on grounds of its dissimilarity from the published novels. ‘Kitty’s Bower’ (the unfinished story now generally referred to as ‘Catharine, or the Bower’), and the other fragments like it, she did not think should be used: ‘What I should deprecate is publishing any of the “betweenities” when the nonsense was passing away, and before her wonderful talent had found it’s proper channel.’32 Caroline also had definite views about which biographical details should be kept under wraps: the flirtation with Tom Lefroy, for instance, and the proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither. ‘I should not mind telling any body, at this distance of time,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘but printing and publishing seem to me very different from talking about the past.’33

  But what about Fanny Knatchbull, the niece who Anna acknowledged had known their aunt best and enjoyed ‘a great & affectionate intimacy’ with her34 and of whom Jane Austen herself had written so lovingly in 1808, ‘I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny; I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another Sister, & could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me. She is quite after one’s own heart; give her my best Love, & tell her that I always think of her with pleasure’?35

  As a source of intimate knowledge, and possessor of the majority of Jane’s surviving letters (including those ones lauding her own charms and dearness), why did Lady Knatchbull not contribute at all to the gathering of memoir material? Various members of the family approached her on James Edward’s behalf, but were met with delays and deferrals. In 1869 Fanny’s sister Elizabeth Rice warned him not to wait for a sight of the letters, as there was virtually no chance of it. Lady Knatchbull, she said, was prone to giddiness and confusion, an impression of advancing senility confirmed by Fanny’s daughter Louisa, who protested that her mother would have been only too delighted to assist James Edward ten years earlier, but it was too late now.