An important difference, of course, is that Marianne was no proud, cold Lady Denham, but a quiet, graceful and compassionate gentlewoman. Diana Parker, on the other hand, in her overbearing determination to do good, anticipates some of the correspondence between Louisa and Fanny during the Irish famine of the 1840s.
Through all her years in England, Marianne’s nature generally predisposed her to see the point of view of others, even if she did not agree with it. A curious story, from Charles’s diary of October 1835, demonstrates Marianne’s steady, uncondescending common sense:
Old Dame Partridge asked Marianne today whether it was true that an army of soldiers had been seen fighting in the sky. All the old crones seem much struck by this report, which someone has put into a newspaper — they were all attention as Marianne told them it was not true, & then proceeded to explain that the newspapers had nothing to put in to fill their columns & employed people called wonder workers to invent extraordinary stories for them.13
It shows, too, what a good teacher Marianne might have been or, in the present age, what an intelligent and sensible commentator on the continuing media habit of employing such ‘wonder workers’. It is a strange anecdote, oddly and unsettlingly anticipating the time eight decades ahead when armies of soldiers would indeed be seen fighting in the sky. Nonetheless, the trusting innocence of Dame Partridge and the other old ladies of the parish is touching testament to Marianne’s ability to bridge the generations, to comprehend and explain, to those who were young with Jane Austen, the rapidly changing face of the world.
As the new decade of the 1850s began, Marianne’s own world was about to change equally radically. Charles was not in residence to help as her father fell into his last illness. Since 1838, he had been rector of Chawton and though, like John, and the kind Morland Rice, he came and did his best for a while, Charles then resumed his own life. Godmersham was Marianne’s life and, in 1850, despite her father’s illness, she was content. Louisa and Lord George, with all five children, were with her for the summer, as were her aunt, Louisa Bridges, and some of Lizzy’s children. Their old ways, lessons and walks, trips to the river and excursions to neighbouring towns went on as before. Morland Rice who, though kind to his grandfather, does not seem to have been overly attached to the rest of the household, took a hard look at the Godmersham gathering that summer, and sent it to his brother, Edward Rice:
At Godmersham all is much as usual — the German tutor — or hog as you view him in his physical or intellectual capacity — and Aunt May still make violent love to one another — Uncle John has still got more or less gout — All the Hills are still there — my Grandfather is still going on just as usual (perhaps better) — and Aunt Louisa still utters goodnatured societisms and bitter politicals.14
Marianne had not, of course, launched herself into a torrid affair as Morland’s nineteenth-century expression might suggest to a twenty-first century mind; what his barbed comment does show is the attractiveness of Marianne’s personality at fifty years old, and her lively intellectual interest in the work the Hill children were pursuing with their tutor.
By 1850, Cassandra’s children, under the care of Louisa, were growing up rapidly. Her eldest daughter, Norah, was particularly striking, as her cousin Louisa Rice noticed that summer. ‘About a month ago,’ Louisa wrote, ‘Uncle George Hill brought Norah over from Ireland to Godmersham … she is the prettiest as well as the nicest girl of 14 I ever saw … she always looks pretty and never thinks an instant about it.’15 Norah, like Lord George himself, was a general favourite. Cassandra’s daughter had inherited not just her mother’s looks but also her passion for the Godmersham hobby of ‘nesting’, searching for birds’ nests in the forest and hedgerows. ‘I have just been nesting with Norah,’ Lizzy wrote to her daughter Caroline Cassandra Rice in May 1850:
... we only went about the Piece and the Lime Walk and we carried the little ladder out of the Orange House with us … we found a good many and she found the most beautiful Golden Cresteds I ever saw, hanging at the end of a branch of a yew tree, down by the Piece — she is longing to come to Dane Court and I hope she will soon after you get home — she is taller than Charlotte and just like what she used to be — she likes nesting and reading better than anything — her hair is immensely thick and long — she wears it plaited in front like Louisa’s and then joined to the back hair … The Park and Woods are more perfectly lovely than I can describe, the Cuckoo is cuckooing over the thatched seat and yesterday I heard it by the Tower when I was walking in the Park with Uncle George Hill ...16
That seemingly perfect summer of 1850 was to be one of the last the family would enjoy. Though Morland thought his grandfather’s health improved a little, Edward was not really getting better and, by 1852, at eighty-five, was clearly deteriorating. His death, however, came suddenly, as another grandson, Montagu Knight, recorded years later:
The squire himself lived on at Godmersham until his death, which took place 19th November 1852. He had been able to take his usual drive on the preceding day; early in the morning of the 19th he desired his servant to leave him, as he felt comfortable and should go to sleep. He seemed to be asleep when the servant returned, but it was the sleep of death. ‘It strikes me,’ wrote one of his relations soon afterwards, ‘as a characteristic end of his prosperous and placid life, and he will certainly leave on the minds of all who knew him an image of Gentleness and quiet Cheerfulness of no ordinary degree.’17
He was certainly gentle, cheerful and placid, and remained to the end of his life in no doubt that his eldest son would carry out the wishes he had expressed thirty years before, and share his good fortune with the others. Yet, Edward Knight Jr had never expressed any intention of moving back from his home at Chawton. His roots were there: his first wife Mary lay buried within sight of Chawton House beside their eldest son, Edward Lewkenor, who had died at school soon after his mother’s passing. It seemed at first, however, that Edward was undecided about Godmersham, as Fanny wrote to Miss Chapman in March 1853: ‘I do not think Edward has determined yet what to do with the place. He has had an architect down and talked of alterations — he cannot afford to keep up both places, but which he will sell he does not know.’18
Edward did not rush to make up his mind, but the family knew that only he had the right to live there, and that he was unlikely to ask any of his unmarried siblings to stay on. The rest of the family, almost all with their own homes, accepted the necessity to hand over the decision to the heir. They were all, however, concerned about John: at forty-four, he had never known any home but Godmersham and, while he could view with equanimity the need to remodel the lives and homes of his brother-in-law’s tenants in Gweedore, he had never had to consider until now that a similar restructuring at Godmersham could affect him. Yet soon, he too had other plans, for he had met a lady, Margaret Pearson, whom he would marry three months after his father’s death. ‘We are very glad,’ Fanny told Miss Chapman, ‘that he should have met with a person, who promises to make him amends for the home he has lost’.19 Who, if anyone, was to make amends to Marianne was not clear. When it emerged, as it very soon did, that Edward wanted vacant possession of the house in order to renovate it, she was the only one left utterly bereft: having given her late girlhood and all her adult years to the care of her father and the estate, and having lived nowhere in her life but Godmersham, she would now, in her fifty-second year, have to find a new home. No longer Miss Woodhouse, she had suddenly become poor Miss Bates.
The loss of Godmersham, though perhaps predictable, seems to have thrown the family into a regressive confusion. Even Fanny, accustomed to command and prepared to overlook some of the most pressing demands of other people’s lives, seemed to need extra support: ‘My poor sister Lady G. Hill came over after my father’s death,’ she told Miss Chapman, ‘but she could not leave the children for long — I wish they could sell their Irish property & come & live in England.’20 Though Fanny described the misery of ‘the packing up, the divisi
on of everybody’s things, parting with servants & ... the expense!’, it was Marianne and her elderly aunt Louisa Bridges who carried out the real, heartbreaking work of emptying the family home, staying on until everything was gone in January 1853.21 Jane Austen, of course, had known such misery years before – first the painful uprooting from Steventon, then the departure from Bath and Southampton without regret but with endless, repeated disruption and distress. Her removal from Steventon all but silenced Jane, and it may be significant that the most fluent and expressive of the Knight letter-writers, Marianne, either left no record of her feelings about this terrible loss, or left a record which no one thought to keep.
Fanny did record that difficult period, telling Miss Chapman that her aunt Louisa Bridges was to go to Goodnestone, the old Bridges home and, assigning to Marianne her usual role of family support, took refuge in the thought that ‘my sister for the present [goes] to Dane Court, where she is a great comfort to Mrs Rice’.22 Lizzy Rice had herself come to give some help with the packing up. She brought her daughter Marianne Sophia, who wrote from Godmersham to her sister Louisa Rice describing the distress and confusion of the upheaval:
I want to go back because if I do not go home with Mama (which I hate) I shall only see her for a night, but they all want me to stay, & if it will be the last time in my life — dr Louisa — if you could see the view from the windows — just how dearest At Louisa [Bridges] (who I think cares more for Grandpapa than anybody) suddenly burst out crying, when At. May & At. Lou [Hill] were gone out of the room … I wish I was going home — but mama says she had rather I would not …23
Her sister Caroline Cassandra had also given some help in packing up the house, and wrote to the reluctant Louisa of her experiences with her aunts, uncles, and the very elderly aunt Louisa Bridges, as they all tried to clear a house that had been a family home for over half a century. In this time of crisis, their characters displayed themselves. Louisa’s open affections, revealed to her family but unseen by, for example, Thomas Carlyle when he visited Ballyare, were here given full expression as she revisited the room she had shared with her sister Cassandra; Charles gave quiet support for the niece who wanted to go walking round the old haunts. Marianne simply withdrew, for the last time, to the room that had been hers:
I am here. I came back with At. Lou Saturday to dine & sleep — I only thought of it just before At. Lou came away— When we got here I went up directly to At. May who was in her room on her sofa reading over old letters. I sat with her till dressing time — she is much more cheerful than expected — I believe she has cried out all the tears — & she really seems to me […] nearly the same as usual — so they all are — at least you know they talk & laugh, dearest At. Lou is so nice & lovely, nicer than anybody nearly— she talked & cried all the way here yesterday — after dinner we all sat & talked all the evening — they were all very glad I came, as they are missing At. K & Mama horridly — This morning I had the Hall Chamber & did not go to sleep till between 4 & 5, thinking how different I felt from our old visits & directly after breakfast I asked uncle Charles to come out, & he & I walked to Bentigh, till past 11 — then I came in & went up to At. Lou’s room, helping her take away & dispose of some of her dearest darling old things, that she could not bear to leave, & she did not know what to do with — she gave me some dear old […] books, to divide between us … with dearest At. Cass’s name written in them —Oh Louisa the sadness of it is too great —At. Lou is in her own dear darling old room … full of relics of her & At. Cass — now it is after luncheon and everybody is somewhere except me & At. Louisa. She is not well, & Aunts May & Lou have asked me to stay in & take care of her whilst they go out walking — when they come in I daresay I shall go out with one or 2 uncles — I wish I could go alone — 24
By June 1853, the house was ‘uninhabited’, as Fanny told Miss Chapman. Marianne had left Lizzy’s house at Dane Court in May and gone to Louisa in Ballyare, ‘where I daresay,’ Fanny wrote, ‘she will stay till the summer,’ adding, ‘I expect that eventually she will live at Chawton Rectory with my brother Charles, who is the only unmarried one.’25 Marianne tidily deposited, all the old bitterness from Edward’s elopement with Fanny’s stepdaughter emerged once more:
My brother & his wife fancy without extensive alterations [Godmersham] cannot be lived in, tho’ I cannot see any fault, or want of accommodation in it, & were I sure of being able to remain there the rest of my life I should be too happy to go into it, with all its ‘defects’ (if it has any), but Edward has had an Architect in to look over it & I believe it depends upon his estimate whether they will live there (after spoiling it) or let it alone & continue to reside at Chawton.26
Then, in the summer, Edward made up his mind. All his siblings’ worst fears were confirmed: Godmersham was to be let out.27 It fell to John Knight, whose birth had occasioned the first great break in the family, to describe the final heartbreak in a letter to Charles. Marianne, still strangely silent at this worst moment in her life, kept the letter. When it was found among her papers after her death, the envelope bore an inscription in her hand: ‘Letter from John Knight when he went to Godmersham after his Father died’:
We started out at abt 9.30 this morning to come home — Most unfortunately it is a thorough wet day: I shall not be able to visit half the dear old places outside which I had intended — in the first plce we drove up to the servts’ hall door, that did not look natural. Mrs Gibson met us in the lobby—I have been all over the house — your room — my room— May’s, Lou’s, study — nursery — every where every where — & now I am sitting at the same table (under Grandmama’s picture) & on the same stool where we all, but May especially, have so often sat & wrote — I pulled the table from the wall into it’s [sic] old place, put the stool in it’s [sic], and here I am, & when I look up (as I so often have done, it is a habit I have when writing or thinking) & look straight before me out of the window which looks to the ice house — I can imagine that ‘the gone days’ have returned, & that our misery is but a dream — everything looks so beautiful & calm & old in the Park, & unchanged too — but when I look inside & see the desolation which surrounds me — the horrid change there! — the silence — the perfect silence — it is but too evident that the misery is the reality — and the happiness the dream — I have seen Gibson & Wills & John Hoskin & several others — some of them asked me how I was, or hoped I had been well, but others did as you say, touched their hats and said nothing longer … I could go on a great deal abt all the things which tug at one’s heart strings here — but what is the use? — I would give much to have a Brother or a Sister with me. Yes! It is the silence the state of desolation which affects me most — it jars upon my very heart — I keep contrasting it’s [sic] present state with that of the last 45 years — outside it is the same — nature is unaffected — the woods —walks — lawn etc, are as in times gone — but inside! oh how changed!
’Tis Greece but living Greece no more
So calmly sweet — so coldly fair.
We start! for soul is wanting there!
Those beautiful lines of Byron’s convey to my mind an exact picture of our lost Home — ‘soul’ is indeed ‘wanting here’ — the soul of him who made it an earthly paradise for us — but surely we have a right to believe that he has but exchanged an earthly for a heavenly Paradise — & in that believe [sic] is of course our comfort … Please to send this to May. How much you will be sorry for her hither coming back! What will you give me to go in your place?28
John, an unsentimental soldier, became on losing Godmersham a lost child, just as he had done when his sister Cassandra died. Leaving very few of his thoughts or feelings in writing, he nevertheless conveyed in this long and impassioned letter the part played by Godmersham in the lives of all the Knight children. He was correct, of course, in knowing that it would be worst for Marianne: now it would fall to the faithful Charles to be her companion.
When Marianne came back from Ireland she moved to the
rectory at Chawton, and together she and Charles began a quiet version of the life they had lived at Godmersham, caring for their garden, seeing to the poor, and putting to one side, just as Jane Austen had done when she moved to that village, their desolation at the loss of their home. Marianne, within the means of a small annuity of £200, left by her father, gave up her status as Miss Knight of the Great House, and took on the role of the parson’s spinster sister.29 Where once she had listed the expenditure of a large estate, she now undertook the economies of a comfortable but modest rectory in the village where her Austen aunts had lived: instead of the supervision of the care of many acres, she now looked after the small rectory garden, just at the end of the driveway to her brother’s great house. Yet, within two years of moving there, she had begun listing the details of her roses, her hyacinths and geraniums, as the garden became her refuge.30 Gradually, the care of Charles, the rectory and its garden, and the relief of the poor became her life.
As Aunt May, she took over where Jane and Cassandra had left off, the maiden aunt keeping an open door for any of the nieces and nephews who visited, wrote to her, or brought her to their grander homes: and neither the new generation nor the old remembered or considered that she had once been the ‘bewitching beautiful’ Marianne, with hopes and ambitions of her own.
The extended family soon faced another great consideration, even more pressing than the settling of their children’s marriages and fortunes. The nephews who had been too young to enter the navy or army now became old enough to fight – just as another major conflict began. The Crimean conflict was the first major confrontation since the Napoleonic Wars. The Crimean prefigured the Great War of 1914–18 in its use of gas, exploding shells, and trench warfare. In its widespread and horrific loss of life, with three quarters of a million soldiers dead through battle or illness, it established the pattern of later engagements. While the older nephews, like Henry Rice, had been subject to such mortal dangers as cholera, they were unlikely to be mown down in a full-scale battle. The Crimea was different: battle lines were drawn up surprisingly quickly as the great powers of the British and Russian Empires saw the weakness of the once magnificent Ottoman Empire. Russia closed in to secure the strategic port of Constantinople, and Britain and France became anxious for the survival of their access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus.31 Before long the dispute had moved from Turkey and the Balkans to include Jerusalem, and a wider debate over religion.32 As one recent commentator remarked, ‘it was the first war to be brought about by the power of the press and public opinion, and the first to be reported in real time via the telegraph’.33 As had been seen during the famine in Ireland, the press had a very powerful effect for good or ill; indeed it is doubtful that without the publicity given to his efforts, Lord George could have brought about his wish to bring extra food to his tenants at Gweedore. Now, in time of war, the press promoted a jingoistic spirit, in contrast to Queen Victoria’s initial reluctance to engage with the Czar, with whom she retained a strong bond. ‘What he did,’ she is reported to have said, ‘was from a mistaken, obstinate notion of what was right and of what he thought he had a right to do and to have.’34 Once the Queen’s scruples were overcome, the press had no further need to hold back. When the Crimea became the field of operations, the young men of Jane Austen’s family were ready to fight, just as their great-uncle Henry Austen had been prepared to fight in Ireland under General Cornwallis during the rising of 1798, or their great-aunt’s fictional Captain Wentworth in defence of the Empire. What no one could have known was that their training left them ill-prepared for this first, deadly modern war.
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