‘Do you know what you’re sayin’?’ she says, an’ slings her bony arm round me to get me off the ground. ‘Course I do,’ I says, ‘an’ if you knew Jane you’d know too.’ ‘That’s enough,’ says she. ‘You’re comin’ on this train if I have to kill a brigadier for you.’62
‘There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place,’ Humberstall concludes. ‘Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.’
Rudyard Kipling was himself ‘in a tight place’ when he wrote ‘The Janeites’, convalescing on the Riviera from a stomach operation. His chronic gastric pain dated from the loss of his only son, John, in the second battle of Loos in 1916, since when Kipling had devoted himself to writing a memorial history of John’s regiment, The Irish Guards in the Great War. ‘The Janeites’ marked his return to health, return to fiction-writing, and a new creative phase. As with the scheme of reading provided by H. Brett Smith, ‘Jane’ was showing her curative powers. His story places a love of Austen and her works among different kinds of mutually beneficial social networks: the Masons, of course, but even the war itself, as Humberstall remarks: ‘In lots o’ ways this war has been a public noosance, as one might say, but there’s no denyin’ it ’elps you slip through life easier. The dairyman’s son ’ad done time on Jordan with camels. So he stood us rum an’ milk.’63 ‘Jane’ allows the soldiers, in their extremity, to slip easier not just through life, but through death, too, amused, comforted and prepared for any irony – even that of being crushed by a gun named after Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Not everyone found that ‘Jane’ survived the war with them. When the future novelist L. P. Hartley went up to Balliol in 1915, one of the friends he made among the very thinned-out undergraduate population included Aldous Huxley, later Austen’s first screen adaptor. On return to Oxford after two years’ home service in the Royal Garrison Artillery, Hartley met another Janeite, the elegant, brilliant Lord David Cecil, with whom he fell deeply and closetedly in love. Cecil’s great admiration for and knowledge of Austen spurred on Hartley to try to like the author as well as he could, but in a talk given many years later to the Jane Austen Society (called ‘Jane Austen and the Abyss’), Hartley related how his feelings for Austen fell off:
The War came, and as Gunner Hartley I went into the Army, which had its rules and regulations, indeed, but not such as I understood, nor do I think Jane Austen would have understood them, for civilised living had gone by the board. Although I never went overseas, Army life did seem at the beginning a kind of Abyss; a chaos without signposts or landmarks, in which dread and bewilderment reigned. I think that during that time my confidence in Jane Austen as an interpreter of life must have been severely shaken, and though I read some escapist literature, I did not return to her.64
It is interesting to see someone not finding Jane Austen a comfort at all, but quite out of key with modern life, and unable to answer the needs of a changed world. Undoubtedly, there was a conflation in Hartley’s mind between Austen and her charming advocate Cecil (the man who was later often spoken of as Austen’s spiritual heir), and the disappointment he felt in the novelist can be seen as a deflection of his painfully chagrined feelings towards the critic, whose engagement to Rachel MacCarthy in 1931 came as one of the most unpleasant shocks of Hartley’s life. But Hartley’s negative feelings about Austen didn’t go away; he later said that he believed Kafka’s depiction of consciousness as neurotic and fragmented was ‘closer to the truth than Jane Austen’s’ and came to favour fantasy as ‘a normal medium for Englishmen in our time’, enabling them ‘to escape what they faced’65 – whatever that might be.
* * *
The first centenary of Austen’s death fell during the war, but might not have been marked publicly at all had it not been for the efforts of the devoted Hill sisters, Constance and Ellen, who took it upon themselves to raise funds for the erection of a plaque on the side of Chawton Cottage and the gift of a ‘Young People’s Library’ in the author’s memory to Steventon village school. This seems to have been more a one-bookcase affair than a whole room, but it delighted Miss Hill. ‘How sweet the Schoolroom looked with its merry nosegays of country flowers – and the dear children’s bright faces,’ she wrote in thanks to the Manor House, ‘so in keeping with dear Jane Austen and her life in the simple Parsonage that it was like a beautiful poem!’66
At the modest ceremony for unveiling the plaque at Chawton Cottage, Constance Hill had been even further transported: ‘We, her grateful readers from far and near, were standing on the very spot where Jane sat at her little mahogany desk and brought into being the gentle Fanny Price, the spirited Emma, and the sweet Anne Elliot.’67 A ‘little company of devotees’ listened as Sir Frederick Pollock made a short speech about how it was now possible to record the final judgment on Austen, and read a letter from W. D. Howells that reflected on the happy condition of being one of Austen’s fans:
She has always been a family cult with us … We talk of her as if she were our living friend, and I do not believe her elect and genial spirit resents our freedom; she must know it is from our grateful love of her.68
Howells made a distinction between writers such as Montaigne, Lamb and Borrow, who had ‘taken the world into their confidence by disclosing themselves’, and Austen, who ‘had commanded our affection because she could not help it, and we had canonised her in her home, as it were, by force’.69 The home in which Austen had been ‘canonised’ was still very much an imaginary one, not the actual house at Chawton, still owned by the Knight family, and in use as estate tenements. No one has recorded what the tenants thought of having Ellen Hill’s plaque fixed to their outside wall, or how they maintained the author’s former residence at this date, if they had been aware of its literary significance before the Hills came along. The centennial celebrations at Chawton, so thinly attended, hardly impacted on the life of the village, unlike the mobbing of the Brontë sisters’ home village, Haworth, twenty years earlier when the first Brontë Museum had opened, attracting ten thousand visitors to the emergent literary shrine in the summer of 1895 alone.
The fact that the party gathered at Chawton had nothing more substantial to hear than the sentimental effusion of the absent American critic, and that Ellen Hill’s Arts-and-Craftsy commemorative plaque had been paid for by ‘Anglo-American friends’, hints at the negligence of the home nation to recognise Austen’s significance up to this point. Nowadays, there are whole sections of UK travel guides devoted to ‘Jane Austen Country’ and a sign welcomes you to it when you cross the eastern county boundaries between Hampshire and Berkshire, but in 1917 there was little identification of the writer with a specific part of England. ‘Jane Austen Country’ was rural, certainly, green, pleasant, quiet and resolutely Southern (unlike the wild, windswept, hill-top North country so topographically suitable to the Brontës’ kind of writing and sensibilities), but its potency resided in remaining amorphous, and if it had a significant location, one would have had to say it was in the past rather than at any co-ordinates on a map. Ellen Hill had grasped this in her illustration to Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends of an old-fashioned finger-post at a rural junction, reading ‘To Austen-Land’, though she might easily have added an identical pointer in every direction.
The recent film treatments of Austen’s novels have gleefully realised the idyll and ideal of England that forms the background to Austen’s selectively realistic love stories. It doesn’t manifest itself very often in the books, but then it doesn’t have to: it is implicit in the author’s deep conservatism (deep as in background, as well as profound). She can be devastatingly, minutely realistic about individuals, but society as a whole, or rather the nation that contains it, is exempt from analysis, from cynicism and from irony. Her eruptions of feeling about it don’t disturb the novels for long, but are powerful.
In the early novels, it perhaps only shows in the picturesque passages about the country near Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, but emerges strongly in the critique of ‘improve
ment’ in Mansfield Park, the sympathy shown in Persuasion for sailors dying ‘in a foreign field’, longing for home, and the passage in Emma where the strawberry-picking party (a mock-idyll presided over by ultra-bourgeois Mrs Elton) looks across the Donwell estate to the meadows, river and farm: ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.’70
The sense of how deeply Austen was in tune with ‘English culture, English comfort’ became much stronger during and after the Great War, as the reporting of the centenary celebration foreshadowed. The Daily Telegraph mused wistfully on the far removal of Austen’s quiet corner of the English countryside ‘from the present world-conflict’, and rejoiced that her themes and method were also worlds away from that of the neurotic moderns: ‘she needed none of the maddening problems which vex and torment the souls of so many of our modern novelists’. Austen could teach these perverse authors a thing or two about how to be a patriotic writer in wartime:
There is no sound of war in her pages, though she had sailor brothers of distinction, and she lived through the Napoleonic era. All is placid in her Hampshire villages; and the main business of life is to marry off marriageable daughters to eligible young men. But as that produced first-class comedy, we profess ourselves thoroughly satisfied, and gladly take this opportunity of laying – even in the midst of this monstrous upheaval – a little token of our abiding gratitude on her grave in Winchester Cathedral.71
‘Placidity’ was, of course, much to be wished for, and Austen could provide a placid new post-war world with images of how things had been, and could be again: ‘peaceful sheltered villages and wooded, gently sloping hills carpeted in spring with primrose and anemone, its lanes winding between high hazel hedges that opened now and then to disclose airy Constablesque vistas of sky and distant downland’, as Lord David Cecil described it.72 In 1922, A. B. Walkley wrote of Austen’s novels as a place to live, a refuge, even perhaps a convalescent home: ‘This house of rest, built and endowed by Jane Austen, becomes for those who have once felt the peace of it a second home.’73
To others, she seemed part of the damage, not the cure. With his very different but no less passionate view of post-war England, D. H. Lawrence singled out Austen as one of the bad old elements that ought to be washed away:
In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then, in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone. Already this old maid typifies ‘personality’ instead of ‘character’, the sharp knowing in apartness, instead of knowing in togetherness, and she is, to my feeling, thoroughly unpleasant, English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense of the word, just as Fielding is English in the good generous sense.74
* * *
Before the Great War, Robert William Chapman had been a lexicographer and editor at the Clarendon Press in Oxford, working on the New English Dictionary and a revision of Liddell and Scott’s standard Latin grammar, but during his four long years of service he conceived a more significant kind of cultural custodianship, declaring that ‘to restore, and maintain in its integrity, the text of our great writers is a pious duty’. His job became a vocation, and (inspired by his wife, as we shall see) the writer he turned to as the most deserving of his devotion and skill was Jane Austen. Chapman’s Clarendon edition of Austen’s novels, published in 1923, was the first complete scholarly edition of any English novelist, employing techniques transposed wholesale from editing of Greek and Latin texts, and giving Austen a unique status in the new discipline of English Literature and beyond. The seriousness with which Chapman treated Austen and her works – so necessary after the depredations of ‘Janeism’ – was pivotal to her establishment as a classic author in the twentieth century.
Robert Chapman was the son of an Episcopalian vicar, born and brought up in Perthshire, who came to Oxford as an undergraduate and spent most of the rest of his life in the city, first at Oriel College, where he was a prize scholar in Classics, later at the University Press. Oddly enough for a man who became obsessed with book collecting, he admitted that, as an undergraduate, ‘I doubt if I knew very well what a folio was,’ and that it was only the antiquarian interests of the young woman he was to marry that kick-started his career as a collector.75 This young woman, Katharine Metcalfe, who Chapman excitedly recalled ‘had bought an Arcadia in folio while yet a schoolgirl’,76 might be said to have been a bit of a collector’s item herself. When Chapman met her in 1912, she had taken a first at Lady Margaret Hall and had just started work as a tutor in English at Somerville. She had also embarked on an ambitious project, encouraged by the critic Sir Walter Raleigh (first Professor of English Literature at Oxford), to undertake a new, textually accurate, edition of Pride and Prejudice, of which she had the loan of a first edition.
Metcalfe’s Pride and Prejudice, published in the year she and Chapman met, was the first to treat Austen’s work as a text rather than a story. The typesetting and page layout (including the antiquarian touch of catch-words at the turn of the page) was handsome and sober, there was a substantial introduction, giving an overview of Austen’s life and works, and appendices explaining matters of social history, domestic life and language in the Regency period. There was also a brief chronology of Austen’s works and the places she had lived in, a selection of quotes from critics and textual notes. These were the most significant of Metcalfe’s innovations: though the textual variants were very few (no original manuscript, of course, existing), she was the first person to acknowledge that they might be worth recording.77
Metcalfe effected ‘Chapman’s real introduction to Jane Austen’, as Margaret Lane later wrote in a round-up of his illustrious career. As the couple fell in love, they planned a jointly edited complete works of Austen, using Metcalfe’s Pride and Prejudice as the model and first volume. Following their marriage in 1913, in line with the university employment regulations of the time Metcalfe had to give up her fellowship at Somerville, and her career as a don was ‘briskly cut short’.78 Her freelance career as an editor continued, though; her handwriting is all over the Chapman archives and in 1923, four months before the publication of her husband’s chef-d’œuvre, OUP published a separate edition by her of Northanger Abbey, a very odd duplication of effort from one household on one subject from one publisher.79 Unlike her 1912 Pride and Prejudice, Metcalfe’s text of Northanger Abbey was not incorporated into the Clarendon edition; not that the former was recognisable in its new packaging, for, remarkably enough, Chapman didn’t mention his wife’s contribution to the project anywhere in the published volumes. His description of her Pride and Prejudice in his Bibliography of Jane Austen, published forty years later, doesn’t go far towards rectifying the oversight: ‘This unassuming edition is equipped with a perceptive introduction and notes, and anticipates the textual rigours of the next item’ – ‘the next item’ being Chapman’s own Novels of Jane Austen.80 Anticipates, not inspired. It is only thanks to later scholars such as David Gilson and Kathryn Sutherland that Metcalfe’s work has been properly acknowledged at all.
Chapman’s landmark edition of Austen was published in five volumes in 1923. It is not clear whether he always envisioned the project going on, as it did, another thirty years, to include all Austen’s extant writing and his own bibliography and edition of the Austen-Leigh Memoir; in the 1920s he had ruled out the juvenilia as suitable material for publishing, though he felt ‘Lady Susan’, ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ worth his attentions. Through his avidity and busyness on behalf of the dead author and her descendants almost as much as through his scholarship, Chapman quickly became the ultimate authority on his subject. All through the 1920s, he was busy tracking down Austen manuscripts and encouraging the Bodleian and the British Library to buy as many of them as possible. The first twelve pages of ‘T
he Watsons’ had been generously donated to a Red Cross sale by W. Austen-Leigh in 1915 and bought by Lady Ludlow, who lent them to Chapman. Lady Ludlow subsequently sold her twelve pages to a bookseller who catalogued them in 1925 for £385, ‘a monstrous price’, according to the scholar. He borrowed the rest of the manuscript from L. A. Austen-Leigh and his three sisters, who didn’t want to sell. ‘It is in my safe at the moment,’ Chapman wrote to a Miss Greene in 1925, evidently pleased at being curator of so much Austen material, if only temporarily.81
In 1922, while Chapman’s Clarendon edition was still unpublished, an attractive edition of ‘Volume the Second’, the original of which was still in Francis Austen’s family, was brought out by Chatto and Windus under the title Love and Freindship. The book had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, who made an ardent case for Austen’s place in the great tradition of the very best English burlesque writing, and was decorated with Cassandra’s appealing watercolour illustrations to ‘The History of England’ as endpapers. Coming out just after Daisy Ashford’s super-selling The Young Visiters (and sharing the same publisher as well as the same endearingly juvenile misspelling), Love and Freindship had considerable impact both as a publishing phenomenon and as an exposé of Austen’s young character, ‘the discovery of an inspiration’, as Chesterton put it. The inventive and irreverent author of ‘Volume the Second’ appeared as the opposite of the restrained, secretly smiling aunt promulgated by the Memoir; as Augustine Birrell said in The Times, ‘we found ourselves simply revelling in the revelation … made to us of the “Elementary Jane”’.82
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