Miss Mitford’s was not the only unlovable portrait of Jane Austen in need of adjustment. Everyone agreed that the biography ought to contain an image of the subject, but there were only Cassandra’s two sketches available, both owned by Charles Austen’s daughter, Cassy Esten Austen, and neither considered of any value. The faceless ‘bonnet’ watercolour was hardly suitable, neither was the unattractive half-finished full-face drawing. Anna was not the only member of the family who thought this picture ‘hideously unlike’ her aunt. A painting was commissioned from a Mr Andrews of Maidenhead to bring Cassandra’s sketch up to an acceptable level of pulchritude and the result was a pastel-coloured image of a chubby, vacant-looking young woman with huge eyes and pink cheeks. As required, it was significantly unlike the original: the subject’s clothes were tidied up, with a concertinaed frill appearing round the cap to frame the face, her slumped posture was rectified, the folded arms (so expressive of the sitter’s mood) unfolded, and the right eye brought down level with the left, and rotated to a less cubist angle. Even the chair that this new ‘Jane Austen’ was sitting on got a makeover, from a simple straight-backed affair to something more polished and substantial, with a decorative curve.
When she saw the result, Cassy Esten Austen remarked, ‘It is a very pleasing, sweet face, – tho’, I confess, to not thinking it much like the original; – but that, the public will not be able to detect.’54 Still, it was ‘very much superior to any thing that could have been expected from the sketch it was taken from’. Andrews’s painting has not been reproduced often (it is used on the cover of Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family); for use as the frontispiece to the Memoir it had to be engraved, and it is the stippled engraving – by the firm of Lizars – which has been endlessly reprinted, copied, parodied, improved, and which was the first (and for many years the only) authorised image of Jane Austen to be offered to public gaze. Lizars’s engraving was very like the Andrews painting, but not identical. The eyes were if anything even bigger, but the expression was not quite so bovine. Now Austen looked slightly uncomfortable rather than just stupid. Cassandra’s picture had made her look tetchy. The only thing all three portraits have in common is the same representation of the number, position and direction of the curls of brown hair emerging from under the subject’s headgear. One senses Cassandra’s gratitude for them – so much easier to do than eyes or a mouth – and Andrews’s and Lizars’s similar relief in having something non-committal to copy. In terms of what Austen actually looked like, they are just about all we can cling on to.
The resulting picture was thought perfectly fit for purpose, however. ‘The portrait is better than I expected,’ Caroline wrote when the first edition of the Memoir reached her, ‘– as considering its early date, and that it has lately passed through the hands of painter and engraver – I did not reckon upon finding any likeness – but there is a look which I recognize as hers – and though the general resemblance is not strong, yet as it represents a pleasant countenance it is so far a truth – & I am not dissatisfied with it.’55 It certainly worked like a charm on the reviewer in the Spectator:
It is a great comfort to us to have so complete a verification of the theory we have always cherished – that Miss Austen’s personal character was a sort of medium between the heroine of Pride and Prejudice , Elizabeth Bennet, and the heroine of Persuasion, Anne Elliot … The portrait prefixed to the volume – a very remarkable portrait – entirely bears out this double likeness to Anne Elliot and Elizabeth Bennet. It is a small head, with very sweet lively eyes, and a fullness about the face which seems to speak of health and spirit, but the air of high breeding and gentleness of nature is deeply impressed upon it. It is refinement, playfulness, and alertness, rather than depth of intellect, which the face seems to express.56
Mr Andrews and Messrs Lizars had done their job well.
* * *
When the Memoir was published, ‘a singular change took place’ in the public’s attention to Austen.57 It wasn’t just that the book attracted dozens of articles, notices and reviews and quickly sold out its first edition of 1,000 copies, but the subject seemed to fire readers’ imaginations to an extraordinary extent. ‘Perhaps never before has so small a volume attracted so much attention!’ Caroline Austen remarked.58 James Edward began to get correspondence from all over England and America from people who had been affected by the portrait of his aunt. ‘These letters afforded him much pleasure and not a little surprise,’ his daughter recalled later. ‘Until that period he had not realized to how large a number of readers, and in what a high degree, the Aunt to whom he as a boy and a young man had been so warmly attached, had also become a living, though an unseen friend.’59 Well, she was their aunt, too, now.
Much to the family’s surprise, there was demand not only for an immediate reprint, but for more information, especially about Austen’s juvenile writing and her unpublished works, which had only been mentioned in passing by James Edward. The rapidly produced second edition included a significant amount of extra material: the tiny play ‘The Mystery’, more letters (including the one to Martha which had been saved by being given away to Miss Quincy, the American enthusiast), the whole of ‘The Watsons’ (named thus at its first appearance by James Edward), a paraphrase of ‘Sanditon’, the cancelled chapter of ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Lady Susan’. This last was not from the original, still in Lady Knatchbull’s possession, but from a copy made by one of the cousins. James Edward’s text wasn’t adjusted to accommodate this editorial U-turn, and on the subject of Jane Austen’s ‘betweenities’ still read: ‘It would seem as if she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously considering how she ought not to write before she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction. The family have, rightly, I think, declined to let these early works be published.’60
Still, there were limits to what the family was prepared to reveal. Lord Stanhope, who had read Henry Austen’s Biographical Notice of 1818 carefully enough to remember the mention of some verses, ‘replete with fancy and vigour’, which Jane Austen had written on her deathbed, wrote to Bentley asking why James Edward Austen-Leigh had not even referred to them in the Memoir. The truth was that the family felt these lines were too frivolous to be broadcast as a last work:
When Winchester races first took their beginning
It is said the good people forgot their old Saint
Not applying at all for the leave of St Swithin
And that William of Wykham’s approval was faint …61
Caroline Austen was annoyed that Lord Stanhope was ‘raising a hue & cry’ about the poem: ‘Tho’ there are no reasons ethical or orthodox against the publication of these stanzas, there are reasons of taste – I never thought there was much point in them – they were good enough for a passing thought, but if she had lived she would probably soon have torn them up.’ This is probably very true, and it is easy to see how the family felt the light tone of the verses ‘would read badly as amongst the few details given, of the closing scene’.62 But its truth was becoming irrelevant, for, as Caroline understood well, there was a sort of Pandora’s box effect under way: ‘Nobody felt any curiosity about [the verses] then [when Henry Austen alluded to them in 1818] – but see what it is to have a growing posthumous reputation! we cannot keep any thing to ourselves now, it seems.’63
The family was waking up to the fact that Aunt Jane’s ephemera, if not of any obvious importance to them, was of great interest to readers and publishers and that ‘an unabated interest is still taken in every particular that can be told about her’, as James Edward said in the preface to the second edition of his book. Bentley reissued all Austen’s novels in 1870, then brought out a lavish collected edition in 1882, on special, weighty paper, with many ‘extras’ (including the Memoir, now treated as a key text), calling it ‘The Steventon Edition’. A burst of other editions followed, from de luxe and copiously illustrated to a sixpenny series: by 1892, you could buy a Jane Austen nov
el in dozens of formats, including a set which stretched out the oeuvre to ten volumes and which was reprinted five times in as many years.
The Memoir was almost universally welcomed as a comforting verification of what readers had hoped, that Jane Austen’s humour and irony, unlike that of later Victorian novelists, arose from a contented mind and life ‘of perfect calm’. ‘It is always a pleasure to know that any popular writer was what he or she “must have been”,’ R. H. Hutton wrote in the Spectator,64 in a neat example of a circular argument. Anne Thackeray was just as convinced that Austen’s life had been ‘touching, sweet and peaceful’ and that her character shared ‘the harmlessness of a dove’.65 ‘As we turn from the story of Jane Austen’s life to her books again, we feel more than ever that she, too, was one of these true friends who belong to us inalienably – simple, wise, contented, living in others, one of those whom we seem to have a right to love.’
But the Memoir also prompted thoughtful readers to question the likeliness of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s portrait, set against the works. In a long and critically searching essay in 1870, Richard Simpson objected that it was wrong to see Austen as a miniaturist rather than a social critic and skilled ironist, and the novelist Margaret Oliphant complained that Austen-Leigh had completely overlooked ‘the fine vein of feminine cynicism which pervades his aunt’s mind’. In a pointed comment on the biographer’s generally apologetic tone, she also blamed him for seeming ‘halfashamed to have it known that [Jane Austen] was not just a young lady like the others, doing her embroidery’.66 Two distinct camps were forming, one containing readers, like Mrs Oliphant, who were keen to celebrate Austen’s mental distinctiveness and artistry, the other – much, much bigger – of those who took comfort in such an artist being just like the rest of us.
Public interest in Austen’s life was stirred further by the publication of the letters that Cassandra had left to Fanny Knight, which on her death in 1882 passed to her son, Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, Lord Brabourne. Within two years, Brabourne had got them into print in a handsome two-volume edition, published by Bentley and with a dedication to Queen Victoria (despite her carelessness of Emma). Lord Brabourne clearly had no scruples about printing his great-aunt’s private correspondence: James Edward Austen-Leigh, Anna Lefroy and Caroline Austen had all died in the previous decade, so never discovered how much had been withheld from them by Fanny Knatchbull.
Though it was still very much a book produced by the family, and took liberties with the text (removing possible coarseness, for example), Brabourne’s edition was unusual for presenting Austen as a legitimate subject for curiosity and speculation. This was very different from the approach of James Edward Austen-Leigh, who only ten years earlier had been so keen to reveal less, not more, than he had discovered about his aunt. Brabourne relied heavily on ‘stuffing’, providing a lengthy biographical and critical introduction (at 111 pages, not far short of James Edward’s whole book) and filling his notes with details of genealogies and county gossip that may have proved invaluable to later editors, but which did not impress contemporary readers much. Mrs Humphry Ward, reviewing the book in Macmillan’s Magazine, laid into Brabourne not just for being criminally boring, ponderous and ‘wandering’ as editor but for choosing to publish Austen’s letters at all: ‘The virtue of literary reticence is fast becoming extinct,’ she wrote; ‘we have almost indeed forgotten that it is a virtue at all.’67
The next generation of Austens, Austen-Leighs, Knights, Lefroys and Hubbacks were numerous, had no personal knowledge of Jane Austen, and were naturally less concerned about issues of privacy or propriety as time went on. The manuscripts and relics that had been dispersed far and wide among them began to acquire potential monetary value, and soon after the publication of the Letters, Lord Brabourne had no qualms about getting rid of the originals. He did so singly at first, perhaps to test the market. ‘I have no doubt I can let you have another letter of Jane Austen for £5,’ he wrote to a dealer in 1891. ‘Most of these letters are signed only “J. A” altho’ they are undoubtedly genuine, & I would willingly add a written statement that I know them to be so.’ He reported that the only manuscript he possessed was ‘Lady Susan’, which the author had given to ‘her favourite niece’, his mother (not exactly true – Cassandra had given it), and that he was thinking of including it in a Sotheby’s sale, ‘unless I shall be previously tempted by a private offer’.68
The frontispiece to volume one of the Letters was a photograph of a full-length portrait of a young girl, bearing the legend ‘Portrait of Jane Austen by Zoffany’. It belonged to a cousin of Brabourne, the Reverend John Morland Rice, and had been given to him by a friend, Thomas Harding Newman, who had it from his step-mother, who in turn had been given the portrait by a cousin of Jane Austen, Colonel Thomas Austen of Kippington in Kent. When Colonel Austen made the gift in 1817, he told Mrs Harding Newman that the subject was the young Jane Austen, having inherited it with the contents of his mother’s house; so ‘family tradition’ about the identification was strong.69
The portrait was accepted at face value for many years, and after its first publication in 1882 was reproduced and copied almost as widely as were images derived from the 1870 Cassandra/Andrews portrait. Of the two, it is the far more attractive picture, but many recent commentators have cast doubt on the identification, mostly on grounds of costume and the lack of any documentary evidence or references to such a painting being made, and on the latest attempt to sell it as ‘a portrait of Jane Austen’, in the spring of 2007, it failed to reach its reserve price and was withdrawn. None of these issues clouded the first appearance of the portrait in print in 1882, however, and its ownership on the Letters side of the family rather accentuated the sense of two camps forming, each with equal claim to be the heirs of the authoress, but not entirely in tune with each other. And whoever the Rice Portrait is of, it has been accepted as a portrait of the young Jane Austen for such a long time now as to form part of her iconography by association.
* * *
James Edward Austen-Leigh had told the story in his Memoir of how the verger of Winchester Cathedral in the 1860s, puzzled by the number of people who wanted to know the whereabouts of ‘Jane Austen’s tomb’, had asked a visitor, ‘Pray, Sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady?’ It was the last date at which such ignorance would be excusable.
In the few years between the publication of his book and his death, James Edward Austen-Leigh used some of the proceeds from the Memoir to have a memorial tablet erected in the aisle of Winchester Cathedral as a sort of vertical postscript to the black marble slab of Jane’s gravestone, and, presumably, as a help to those lost tourists. ‘Jane Austen/known to many by her writings,’ it began, clarifying the gravestone’s reticence. By the turn of the century, an anonymous writer in the Church Quarterly Review remarked that ‘in 1870 the love for [Austen’s] writings was the possession of a select but limited circle, [but] in 1900 every man of intellectual pretensions either likes to read her books or thinks it necessary to apologize if he does not’.70 The Memoir may have been intended to resolve ‘the vexed question between the Austens and the Public’, but in fact James Edward and his sisters had opened the floodgates to speculation and curiosity about their aunt. She was public property, and on her way to becoming a national treasure.
Notes - Chapter 4: A Vexed Question
1. CH, vol. 1, p. 2.
2. ibid., p. 148.
3. Gilson, M121.
4. Austen-Leigh (1920), p. 2.
5. Queen Victoria’s diary, 7 March 1858, quoted in CH, vol.2, p. 141; CR, vol. 1, p. 120.
6. Taylor, vol. 2, p. 193.
7. Memoir, p. 186.
8. Letters, p. 44.
9. National Portrait Gallery, 20 May? 1869, and Hampshire Record Office 23M93/86/3c. Anna Lefroy made her own continuation of ‘Sanditon’, not published in her lifetime, so may have felt personally thwarted by her cousin. She also used the designation ‘By a Niece of th
e late Miss Austen’, for the publication of a short novel called Mary Hamilton in Watt’s Literary Souvenir, 1834.
10. Austen-Leigh (1942), p. 300.
11. ibid., p. 315.
12. Austen-Leigh (1920), p. 2.
13. Gaskell, pp. 336–7.
14. ibid., pp. 337–8.
15. MW, pp. 397–8.
16. Gaskell, p. 338.
17. CH, vol.1, p. 150.
18. ibid., p. 200.
19. ibid., p. 213.
20. ibid., p. 196.
21. Caroline Austen to James Edward Austen-Leigh, 1 April? 1869, Memoir, p. 186.
22. Trevelyan, vol. 2, pp. 379 and 466.
23. Her daughter reported watching Anna burning a manuscript, which she took to be this novel, ‘Which is the heroine?’, though a novel of that – very unusual – title was published anonymously in 1826, and could have been Anna’s.
24. Memoir, p. 162.
25. ibid., p. 166.
26. ibid., p. 8.
27. ibid., p. 184.
28. ibid., p. 221n.
29. ibid., p. 173.
30. ibid., p. 189.
31. ibid., pp. 186–7.
32. ibid., p. 186.
33. ibid., p. 188.
34. ibid., p. 158.
35. Letters, p. 144.
36. Le Faye (2000), pp. 38–9.
37. ibid.
38. Memoir, p. 158.
39. ibid., p. 10.
40. ibid., p. 132.
41. ibid., p. 73.
42. ibid., pp. 9–10.
43. ibid., p. 79.
44. CH, vol. 1, p. 64.
45. Morgan MA 3610 and Memoir, p. 23.
46. Memoir, p. 21.
47. ibid., p. 51.
48. ibid., p. 82.
49. ibid., p. 173.
50.16–17 December 1816, Letters, p. 323.
51. Memoir, p. 18.
52. ibid., p. 90.
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