Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  But at the same time as these petitions for help with the memoir were flying round the family, Lady Knatchbull wrote an infamous letter to another sister, Marianne, that shows more focus than confusion about the subject:

  Yes my love it is very true that Aunt Jane from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent & if she had lived 50 years later she would have been in many respects more suitable to our more refined tastes. They were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes –36

  If it hadn’t been for her own father’s elevation into the gentry, her mother’s real gentility and the influence of their wealth, Fanny believed her unfashionable and unsophisticated Hampshire aunts would have been ‘tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways’. As it was, they had enough of a struggle covering up their inherent ‘signs of “common-ness”’.37

  The sour snobbery of this could, of course, be a symptom of the failing mental powers which Lady Knatchbull’s family hinted at, but seems to reflect her views at the time of writing. No wonder, then, that she didn’t want anyone to read Jane’s letters or quote them in a published book. They would only confirm the dreaded ‘commonness’ of the Hampshire Austens, and her own close commerce with it in the 1800s and 1810s. Anna Lefroy had a separate theory about the chill between the Hampshire and Kent Austens, believing that her uncle Edward’s wife Elizabeth Knight (who she felt was a bit of a Philistine) had markedly preferred Cassandra to Jane, and had passed on this prejudice to her children (of whom, of course, Lady Knatchbull was the eldest).38

  Lady Knatchbull never remarked on the biography of her aunt, if she ever read it. But her motives for keeping Jane Austen’s letters so thoroughly to herself were probably mixed, for when the old lady died in 1882, in her ninetieth year, her son found the supposedly lost ‘Lady Susan’ and a box containing over ninety of Jane’s letters ‘fastened up carefully in separate packets’ with Cassandra Austen’s inscriptions, bequeathing them to Fanny. More surprisingly, the manuscripts were also inscribed in Lady Knatchbull’s hand, as late as 1856, in words that displayed all her former fondness: ‘Letters from my dear Aunt Jane Austen, and two from aunt Cassandra after her decease.’ Like her aunt Cassandra, she had perhaps placed too high a value on these remaining letters either to share or to destroy them.

  * * *

  Jane Austen is now considered to be one of the most difficult and challenging of biographical subjects, second only to Shakespeare in terms of how little of the life is knowable and of what interest it is. The complexity of the novels, the originality, intelligence and vitality of the mind behind them make many of Austen’s admirers long for more evidence of her inner life, and in its absence, find fertile grounds for speculation. But for James Edward Austen-Leigh in the late 1860s, the agenda was very different: his aim was to point out the consistency between his subject’s life and works, and the wholesomeness and harmlessness of both. James Edward’s own realisation that his aunt was a serious author had come very late, and he had little time to assimilate it before her death. His portrait of her reflects this, emphasising her domestic life, duty to family, contentment and piety as the norm, with her literary genius a happy surprise that disturbed neither herself nor others. He calls her ‘dear aunt Jane’ in the very first sentence of his book, and encourages the reader to adopt a similarly familiar viewpoint: ‘We did not think of her as being clever, still less as being famous; but we valued her as one always kind, sympathizing, and amusing.’39

  The tone of James Edward’s biography was very close to Henry Austen’s original ‘Biographical Notice’, with the emphasis firmly on the eventless nature of the life in question, the subject’s cheerful and unselfish disposition, and well-balanced character: ‘There was in her nothing eccentric or angular, no ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner; none of the morbid sensibility or exaggeration of feeling, which not unfrequently accompanies great talents,’ James Edward asserted,40 in a passage notable for its relentless negativity. Perhaps he was thinking of his own father, James Austen, as an example of the ‘great talent’ plagued by morbid sensibility. James Edward clearly was thinking of his father for much of this biography of his aunt, quoting verses by him (anonymously) to illustrate topographical points and introducing anecdotes of his time at Oxford. James Austen, ‘writer of the family’ no more, haunts the book and its author.

  James Edward painted a cheerful picture of family life at Steventon Rectory, the intelligence and good humour of the parents, their offspring’s personal charms and professional achievements. His evasions were almost all conventional for the time (just as sensational revelations are now conventional in biography) and understandable, if not essential, in terms of family loyalty and discretion. He omitted Jane’s brief engagement to Harris Bigg-Wither and the rumour that she had once had a ‘seaside romance’ with a man who subsequently died, and only felt free to make a passing reference to Jane’s flirtation with Tom Lefroy because Lefroy died, aged ninety-three, while the book was being written. Otherwise, he represented his aunt as having lived a life without romantic entanglements or longings and gave a resolutely surface view of her social self: ‘with all her neighbours in the village she was on friendly, though not on intimate, terms. She took a kindly interest in all their proceedings, and liked to hear about them. They often served for her amusement; but it was her own nonsense that gave zest to the gossip. She was as far as possible from being censorious or satirical.’41 This was an oblique parry to those who had criticised Austen’s chilliness; elsewhere he tackled Charlotte Brontë’s remarks about Austen’s style by quoting a passage which can be read as defending both women’s right to their own form of expression.

  James Edward’s portrait is more suggestive than specific about his aunt’s character. Though he asserts in the first pages that ‘there was scarcely a charm in her most delightful characters that was not a true reflection of her own sweet temper and loving heart’,42 he doesn’t provide any examples of how exactly she might have resembled Emma Woodhouse or Lizzie Bennet, nor does he stray into the territory of whose imagination created the less delightful characters in the books. Of Archbishop Whately’s conjecture that Fanny Price’s unrequited love in Mansfield Park must have stemmed from experience, James Edward protests that any such suggestion is ‘wide of the mark’ and that the worldly knowledge displayed in the books was ‘the intuitive perception of genius’. His aunt loved her home, her family (particularly her sister), her God; indulged only ‘wholesome pleasures, duties and interests’ and found the modest dimensions of Chawton Cottage perfectly ‘sufficient’. Everything was sufficient for ‘Aunt Jane’.

  If Mrs Gaskell’s stylistic model for her Life of Charlotte Brontë was the romantic novel, that of James Edward’s Memoir of Jane Austen was the form most familiar to him, the sermon. Thus he felt free to introduce into the biography scholarly digressions, quotations from scripture, classics and critical authorities and passages of deliberate, steadying dullness, in the time-honoured pulpit mode. Some of this was the ‘stuffing’ that Caroline had so accurately predicted would be necessary, such as the inclusion of bits of family memorabilia and letters; at other times the biographer seemed to stray rather far from his subject, as in his ruminations on dinner-table decorations in the early century and a lengthy reflection on the history of spinning. Even the personal reminiscences could seem rather beside the point – his emphasis, for example, on Jane Austen’s manual dexterity: ‘None of us could throw spilikins in so perfect a circle, or take them off with so steady a hand. Her performances with cup and ball were marvellous.’ This isn’t exactly how Jane Austen might have expected to be remembered, nor for her neat way with folding and sealing letter-paper. But James Edward wanted to assure his readers that to Austen, such things were no
t peripheral and no domestic duty or accomplishment suffered in the making of her novels. He gives the example of the handiwork of a ‘housewife’ needle-case Austen once sewed for his mother, Mary Lloyd, showing that ‘the same hand which painted so exquisitely with the pen could work as delicately with the needle’.43 Phew!

  Just where Austen could be placed in terms of class was a major preoccupation of the whole book. Even in 1816, Walter Scott had remarked that Austen’s ‘most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard’;44 the implication being that that was the class she knew best, and belonged to. Fifty years later, the early decades of the century seemed coarse and bumptious to the affluent gentlefolk of mid-Victorian England, and the Hampshire Austens were obviously not immune to similar, if less obnoxiously expressed, feelings to Lady Knatchbull’s about how the passage of time might have left their aunt’s life open to socially disadvantageous interpretation. The Chawton ladies, with their donkey cart and chickens, their poky parlours and home-made caps, were something for the nieces and nephews to look back on with a certain fond embarrassment rather than pride, and James Edward included in his book many passages on changing manners that were clearly intended to head off any misjudgment of the family as vulgar or poor: the fact that the Austens grew their own potatoes, for example, and furnished their home in a way which ‘would appear to us lamentably scanty’. Even Anna expressed some surprise when she remembered the ‘cheap-looking carpet’ and ‘cheaply papered walls’ of Steventon Rectory, and James Edward thought the lack of cornices there and ‘naked simplicity’ of a few exposed beams adequate explanation to an audience of 1870 why the house ‘has since been considered unworthy of being the Rectory house of a family living’.45

  The ground bass of apology and uncertainty can be heard even in James Edward’s description of the part of Hampshire in which Austen was born and raised: ‘the features are small rather than plain … the hills are not bold, nor the valleys deep; and though it is sufficiently well clothed with woods and hedgerows, yet the poverty of the soil in most places prevents the timber from attaining a large size. Still it has its beauties.’46 He felt that the few extracts from his aunt’s letters required apology, too: ‘there is in them no notice of politics or public events; scarcely any discussions on literature, or other subjects of general interest … the reader must be warned not to expect too much from them’.47 Austen-Leigh certainly could not be accused of over-selling his product, though his hesitance, so clearly genuine, may have contributed more to his book’s effect than if he had adopted the role of an enthusiast. His qualified praises, underwhelming assertions and multiple negatives left plenty of room for readers to supply their own enthusiasm, even love, for the subject.

  Pivotal to the appeal of the life was the family’s account of how this meek paragon had produced her books: working in the common sitting-room, ‘subject to all sorts of casual interruptions’, ‘she wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper’. The swing door creaked, but our authoress, in an isolated exhibition of self-interest, ‘objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming’. If any member of the family disturbed her writing, as James Edward guesses they all must have done, they were never aware of it through ‘any signs of impatience or irritability in the writer’.48 The passage in Caroline Austen’s manuscript, ‘My Aunt Jane Austen’, from which James Edward was deriving much of this, is far less certain about the nature of the writing that was going on: ‘My Aunt must have spent much time in writing – her desk lived in the drawing room. I often saw her writing letters on it, and I believe she wrote much of her Novels in the same way – sitting with her family, when they were quite alone; but I never saw any manuscript of that sort, in progress.’49 These qualifications to the evidence of ‘how Austen wrote’ were all obliterated in the retelling.

  The other cornerstone of the future Austen legend was the extreme of self-deprecating modesty suggested in Austen’s remark about her ‘little bit of Ivory’. This phrase, already publicised in Henry Austen’s Biographical Notice, and originally from a letter of Jane Austen to James Edward himself, seems to have been coined with the half-desire to set the reader’s teeth on edge. The context of the letter is important: Austen had been bolstering the young James Edward’s self-esteem in the kindest manner imaginable, congratulating him on his passage out of Winchester College, joking about their shared occupation (novel-writing) and sympathising with the young man for having mislaid two and a half chapters of his work in progress. The metaphors seem to get rather mixed at this point, as Austen jokes that she can’t be suspected of stealing the chapters, even though ‘two strong twigs & a half towards a Nest of my own, would have been something’: ‘What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?’50 What did she mean? It couldn’t have been simple modesty, for this degree of modesty, or flattery, from the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma (just out that month) towards her eighteen-year-old novice-writer nephew would have been false indeed. Was she suddenly struck with one of those frequent anxious thoughts in the later letters about the sustain-ability of her gift and the degree of ‘labour’ it required? Or had her auntly benevolence simply run its course in this paragraph and introduced a little bit of Irony, letting her nephew understand that they were chalk and cheese?

  The problematic phrase has led a much happier life detached from its context, signifying Austen’s confession to limitations of scale. No matter that the little bit of Ivory had a literal as well as a metaphorical meaning (portable notebooks of the late eighteenth century were made from thin sheets of horn or ivory, two inches wide, which were wiped clean for re-use): the metaphor is what has stuck in readers’ minds, evoking miniature-painting, dedication to craftsmanship, doggedness and painstaking expertise. Austen appears to be anticipating the criticism most often levelled at her in after-years that she was too small scale, and inviting sentimental admiration, or at least forgiveness, for that characteristic instead.

  Everything in James Edward’s portrait confirms this sense of Austen knowing and loving her boundaries: ‘She was always very careful not to meddle with matters she did not understand,’ he wrote, ‘she never touched upon politics, law, or medicine, subjects which some novel writers have ventured on rather too boldly.’51 The story of the Prince Regent’s patronage is told as the apogee of Austen’s success, and edited parts of the correspondence with Clarke reproduced to emphasise Austen’s civility and restraint. The ‘Plan of a Novel’ is also partly reproduced, though Austen-Leigh’s editing of it and Clarke’s letters take much of the sting out of the satire. ‘I doubt whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note, whose personal obscurity was so complete,’ James Edward marvelled in conclusion: ‘Jane Austen lived in entire seclusion from the literary world: neither by correspondence, nor by personal intercourse was she known to any contemporary authors. It is probable that she never was in company with any person whose talents or whose celebrity equalled her own; so that her powers never could have been sharpened by collision with superior intellect, nor her imagination aided by their casual suggestions.’52 No collision, no collusion: ‘whatever she produced was a genuine home-made article’. Austen’s writing was domestic, personal, crafted, small scale, quintessentially female.

  James Edward Austen-Leigh was not actively seeking to set his aunt up as a feminine ideal, but that was the channel into which his thoughts (the thoughts of a clergyman as well as a nephew) ran naturally. His book was undertaken for defensive reasons; it sought to answer ‘vexatious’ questions about Austen that had already arisen in pu
blic debate, and nip any further questions in the bud. One of the central (unspoken) questions was that of the propriety of a decent woman being a professional writer at all, a question Southey had answered roundly in 1836 in a letter to Charlotte Brontë: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life; & it ought not to be.’53 Mrs Gaskell had worked hard, in her biography of Brontë, to overlay the ‘unladylike’ image of the author which many readers had deduced from the novels with a counterbalancing Angel, victim of circumstances and rough company, and emphasised the Currer Bell/Charlotte Brontë divide as a way of dramatising the tension in Brontë between her artist self and her private life. Austen-Leigh implicitly denied the possibility of any such division existing in his aunt’s case. He emphasised her unity of mind, her imperturbability, the seamless segues from creativity to domesticity. It was really no bother at all, having an artistic temperament. Nice, even.

  His book was finished, and at the printers, when the late Mary Russell Mitford’s letters were published, revealing Mitford’s mother’s opinion of Austen having been ‘a husband-hunting butterfly’ in her youth, and the unnamed friend’s later portrait of Austen as the ‘poker of whom everybody was afraid’. These images could hardly have seemed more at odds with the picture being prepared by Austen-Leigh, who appended a postscript vigorously refuting Miss Mitford’s ‘misrepresentation of my aunt’s manners’ and discrediting the remarks on the grounds that they were merely hearsay.