This dignified equanimity of temper by which, remarkably, she continued to distinguish herself, was about to be tried further. Since 1864, Marianne’s cousin and first admirer, James Edward, now James Edward Austen Leigh, had been attempting to collect material for a memoir of their aunt Jane.27 He had resisted earlier requests to compile such a work and had been accustomed to answer, when urged upon the subject, that as there was so little to tell, he considered it impossible to write anything that could be called ‘a life’. At length, however, he agreed to put down whatever he could find. His interest grew as he wrote; he appealed to other members of the family, some of whom he had not seen for years, and he received assistance from several quarters in the form of letters and manuscripts. His half-sister, Anna Lefroy, admitted that, though she had spent much time with her aunt, her memories were fragmented. She remembered, however, that though Mrs Edward Austen, the former Elizabeth Bridges, had never cared as much for Jane as for Cassandra, ‘there grew up during the later years of Aunt Jane’s life a great and affectionate intimacy between herself and the eldest of her nieces’ at Godmersham.28 This, of course, was Fanny, the niece whom Jane had once considered ‘almost another sister’. Yet, James Edward failed to obtain any information from Lady Knatchbull.29 It had seemed reasonable to him that Fanny would be happy to contribute information and for a memoir to be published. Inexplicably, Fanny resisted, and no application to her, or to her daughters, could change her mind.
She was not simply being difficult: Fanny truly believed, as Cassandra Austen had, that the world had no business knowing about her aunt’s private life. James Edward persisted. He wanted to include not only the letters Fanny held but also the manuscripts she had in her possession, including what was later to be known as Lady Susan. Fanny would not change her mind. Her daughter, Louisa Knatchbull-Hugessen, gave another reason for her mother’s unwillingness to allow the letters to be consulted. Fanny’s memory loss had grown so very much worse by the time James Edward made his request that her daughter implored him not to add to her mother’s distress:
We are most willing & anxious to help you about Aunt Jane’s letters, but it is more difficult than you can imagine. In fact it is almost impossible to convey to anyone at a distance the real state of the case, which I am told is a very singular one — for tho’ my mother’s memory is gone, her intellect is as clear as ever, & her brain only too active. This makes it impossible to get at her private papers without an amount of argument, & reiterations most injurious to her — & at the same time she is quite incapable of looking over the letters herself — I have no doubt that she would gladly enter into the plan, & attempt the task — but it would be impossible for her to come to any decision, & as unfortunately she cannot recognise the impossibility she would not allow me to help her.30
She added, sadly, ‘I only wish the “Memoirs” had been written ten years ago when it would have given my mother the greatest pleasure to assist, both with letters and recollections of her own. She has thoroughly enjoyed the book and read it again and again.’31 Fanny’s memory loss, which she herself had noted as early as 1862, gradually became more marked, and with it there developed certain uncharacteristic alterations to her personality.32 The presence of what may have been dementia may also account for the strange and disturbing letter which she wrote to Marianne in August 1869. Beginning ‘Yes my love,’ it appears to answer a question asked by her sister, and its timing, weeks before the Memoir’s publication, suggests that the question may have been part of an attempt by Marianne either to help the cousin who had once found her so ‘bewitching beautiful’, or to understand her sister’s continued refusal to cooperate:
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, and 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 — but I think in later life their intercourse with Mrs Knight (who was very fond of & kind to them) improved them both & Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all signs of ‘commonness’ (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined, at least in intercourse with people in general. Both the Aunts were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the world and its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent, & the kindness of Mrs Knight, who used often to have one or other of the sisters staying with her, they would have been, tho’ not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society and its ways. If you hate all this I beg yr pardon, but I felt it at my pen’s end & it chose to come along & speak the truth …33
Such an unwarranted dismissal is excusable if the writer was indeed suffering from a mind-altering illness; yet, even if she were not, Fanny’s long years of responsibility and anxiety had long since robbed her of the spirit and joy which so delighted her aunt at the beginning of the century. Where Jane Austen had been a Georgian, a proponent of the middle way and the ‘good sense’ advocated by the eighteenth-century writers she admired, Fanny was, by 1869, a narrow-minded, intransigent Victorian.
For Marianne, the gradual loss of Fanny, her mentor for almost seventy years, meant that she lived in an increasingly lonely world. There was worse to come. In 1874, Edward Knight decided to sell the entire estate of Godmersham, with its fifteen farms. One suggested explanation is that the decision was reached because of financial considerations, combined with disagreements between Edward’s first and second families.34 Whatever the reason, Godmersham was sold to John Cunliffe Lister Kay, the son of a wealthy manufacturer in the Midlands.35 The shock to the rest of the family was enormous: Fanny’s relations with Edward and his family had been at best ambivalent since his elopement with her stepdaughter in 1826, yet her illness meant that she was no longer the force she had been.36 Lizzy, however, felt the loss greatly, writing to her daughter Louisa at Chawton House:
I am thinking so much of all the dreadful sale which even now seems impossible for Uncle Edward ever to have done, that I cannot help writing about it to someone who feels it and cares about it which alas he cannot do or he never could have done it. I am glad I am not at Chawton. I do not think that I could behave with the affection towards Uncle Edward that I always have had for him especially, he has done such a very wrong and totally unjustifiable thing … Such a thing as this must be felt and never can be forgotten.37
Lizzy’s daughter Caroline Cassandra, who as a young girl of eighteen had helped her aunts Marianne and Louisa clear Godmersham in 1853, wrote once more about the old house to her sister Louisa:
I hoped Mama had got over it more — I mean she felt hearing of the sale more than I hoped she would — but still it would have been wonderful if she hadn’t … on the whole one may be thankful that it is I trust doing her no more harm.38
Lizzy, at first so shocked that her head was ‘shaky and noisy owing to tears and gout’, had eventually collected herself sufficiently to contribute a page to Caroline Cassandra’s letter.39 ‘Don’t distress yourself,’ she wrote, ‘about my sorrow for G[odmersham]. It will not do me any harm now and my Head is better & I go on liking my drives & planning work.’ For her brother, however, she could not yet find forgiveness, especially when she learned that he did not wish to keep Godmersham’s paintings and library: ‘Uncle Edward is too dreadful to think of — not care for the pictures & books.’ She concluded: ‘Don’t fancy I think you do not care enough about G[odmersham]. I know you do but who can like us who were born there.’ 40
Lizzy was the second of the Knight children to be ‘born there’. From the others, no reaction survives. William Knight, the first of Edward Austen’s family to be born at Godmersham, who had been Rector for fifty years at Jane Austen’s first home at Steventon,
had died the previous winter. Marianne, the third of the Godmersham-born children, may well have written to her sisters about it: if she did, the letters were not kept. Equally, it may be that having ‘cried out all her tears’, as Caroline Cassandra had written twenty-one years before, and accepted the grievous loss of the home she had run since the age of nineteen, Marianne may have kept to herself any new feelings arising from the sale. Unlike Lizzy, Fanny and Louisa, she and John could hardly afford the luxury of indignation.
One by one, the generation of young nieces and nephews whom Jane Austen had known was passing away. Anna Lefroy had died in September 1872 and her half-brother James Edward Austen Leigh, Marianne’s first admirer and, like Anna, the fortunate recipient of Jane’s critical appreciation of his early writing, had seen his Memoir go into a second and third edition before his death in September 1874.41 Fanny’s memory deteriorated further. By 1875, at the age of eighty-two, she was having difficulty recognising her grandchildren and, by 1878, could no longer bear to have her son and grandson with her at meals, thinking them strangers; time had imploded, and her granddaughter Eva was sometimes her sister Louisa, sometimes Lizzy.42 In the narrowing circle of her generation, Marianne had few to whom she could turn. On 10 January 1878 her youngest brother, John, died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving her once more without a home. There was more to come. ‘We are very uneasy about Ld. G. Hill,’ Lizzy wrote to her son Walter. ‘He is dangerously ill of congested lungs and they say his recovery is … hopeless here. His children are all sent for, & I fear the worst very much — Aunt May is there.’ 43 Marianne, no longer needed in England, went at once to Ireland to help her distraught sister.
In the late 1870s, Donegal was a very different place from that which Marianne had seen on her visit in 1853. Following the famine, before the sheep wars of the mid-1850s began, an atmosphere of relative calm had prevailed in Donegal. The young rebels of 1848, such as fiery John Mitchel and the contentious parliamentarian William Smith O’Brien, had failed in their attempt to bring about change in the spirit of revolution then sweeping Europe. Impatient with O’Connell’s attempts to have the Union repealed, they had themselves faltered, unable to agree on a coherent policy.44 Few believed any more, as the dreamer poet Thomas Davis had, that the country would stand up for a cultural ideal; instead, a new and much more militant mood prevailed. The Fenian brotherhood, or Irish Republican Brotherhood, under James Stephens, determined to be more effective than Young Ireland, and looking back to Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen for their models, had already stirred revolutionary feelings once in 1858.45 By 1860, the first of a series of land acts had begun to change relations between landlord and tenant yet again. Under this, their relationship was ‘deemed to be founded on the express of implied contract of the parties and not upon tenure or service’. This seemed to give the landlord more power to set his own terms. A new act, however, under William Gladstone in 1870, following the principle of the ‘Ulster Custom’, gave evicted tenants the hope of compensation for improvements they had made, and the hope of purchasing land with a loan from the state.46 As the 1870s closed, only land was considered worth a struggle.
The culture of resistance spread rapidly. Such cases as that of Charles Cunningham Boycott, agent in County Mayo to John Crichton, 3rd Earl of Erne, received immediate and widespread attention.47 As a test case, he was perhaps the most famous of those ostracised by the Land League, and his name as a consequence passed into the language. Yet, he was not a landlord, unlike Lord George’s near neighbour in Donegal, William Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim, whose murder in April 1878 shocked society in both Ireland and England. Though popular memory condemns Leitrim as a tyrant, a body of evidence exists, as A.P.W. Malcomson has recently demonstrated, that he ‘sought out the common ground between landlord and tenant, and embarked on new enterprises which promised to conduce equally to the advantage of both’.48 In this, his efforts were not dissimilar to those of Lord George, known to Leitrim since his time as Comptroller of the Royal Household in Dublin. Indeed, as early as 1840, Lord George had been an object of admiration to Leitrim for his ‘superior management’ in Gweedore.
As Malcomson makes clear, however, Leitrim did not share Lord George’s early tolerance of ‘tenant right’: he had offended his tenants over his requirement that they pay charges for the seaweed, or ‘wrack’, which they had been in the habit of collecting, for their own use, from the shores of his estate.49 Leitrim was well aware that he could become a target for militants. In 1860, he had made a chillingly prescient observation: ‘A man’s life in Ireland is a simple matter of traffic: how much is it worth? If it be considered a good speculation to take it, slander of the most ingenious kind is resorted to for the purpose of preparing the neighbourhood for his fall.’ 50 His prediction was accurate; he was murdered near his home, on the shores of Mulroy Bay, on 2 April 1878. For Lord George, as a fellow-landlord as well as a friend, it was a severe blow. He had been one of the executors of Leitrim’s 1859 will, though not of his final will, and the murder was a source of shock and great sadness to him, causing him to regret in the last year of his own life that ‘of late years [Leitrim had] always said he could not come to see us because he had so much business’.51 Though by then Lord George himself was less engaged with the work of the estate as a result of his health, he had already expressed his distrust of the new land agitation.52 In practical terms, however, unable or unwilling to make the effort to comprehend this new movement, Lord George was no longer in the forefront of change. It was his son Arthur who needed to address what was happening.
It was to this Donegal, wary, and mistrustful of its neighbours, that Marianne Knight, in her seventy-eighth year, travelled to help Louisa care for her dying husband. As Lizzy’s letter indicated, very little hope was held out for her brother-in-law’s recovery. On 6 April 1879, Lord George Hill died, aged seventy-seven, in Ballyare House. His death was registered in Ramelton twelve days later by his son Augustus, giving his occupation as ‘gentleman’, and the cause of death as ‘senile decay and congestion of the lungs’.53
He was buried beside Cassandra in Conwal Cemetery, Letterkenny. Though only Augustus was listed as witness to the death, all Lord George’s children had been sent for, as Lizzy had told her daughter. The eldest, Norah, Mrs Somerset Ward, was by 1879 the mother of grown children, with a daughter who was herself on the verge of marriage. Arthur, the heir, had been married since 1871 to Helen Emily Trench, daughter of Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, who had once joined Lady Campbell in enthusiastic praise of Jane Austen. Arthur, Captain Hill, was settled just outside Dublin, while his two unmarried brothers, Augustus and Louisa’s son George, a barrister, spent time between Dublin and Ballyare. The youngest of Cassandra’s children, Cassandra Jane Louisa, was in a different position. Born three days before her mother’s death, she was thirty-seven, unmarried and without a profession. She had spent her adult life occupying herself like her stepmother and aunts with duties to the poor and, fluent like her father in the Irish language, teaching the children of the tenantry. Thoughtful, lively and intelligent, Cassandra alone was committed to living in Donegal and working with the people there, having inherited something of her father’s imaginative understanding of custom and tradition. Yet, primogeniture meant that the estate passed to her eldest brother Arthur, who showed no inclination to follow his father’s example and move there, any more than his cousin Edward Knight had wished to move back to Godmersham when his father had died.
For Marianne, returning to England after Lord George’s death, it may not have seemed that she would be likely to spend long periods in the turbulent surroundings of Donegal. For the children of her sisters Cassandra and Louisa, however, there was less choice. With sole charge of the estate at Gweedore, Arthur was in no mind to entertain any kind of challenge to his authority. Attitudes had hardened on both sides in a time of widespread economic depression. Following yet another failure of the harvest in 1879, and the consequent absence of provision for
his tenants by Arthur, the newly founded Land League quickly gathered strength in Donegal under the leadership of a charismatic and highly intelligent parish priest, Father James McFadden.54
James McFadden had been born to a comfortable and ambitious farming family near Carrigart in Donegal in 1842, barely two months after the death of Cassandra Knight. Thirteen years after Catholic Emancipation, Catholic families remained acutely aware that education, whether in the Church or the Law, was still the best and surest route for a clever child to make his way in the world.55 McFadden was such a child and, moving without difficulty through the National School system to the Diocesan Seminary at Letterkenny, he completed his studies for the priesthood at Maynooth in County Kildare, where he was noted for his scholastic excellence. His natural abilities, combined with the self-confidence which, as a cousin of two important churchmen, he had in abundance, fitted him for the role he discovered for himself in Gweedore.56 He saw himself, and was accepted, as the guardian of the people and the safe keeper of their money until such times as rents should be set at a level acceptable to the Land League. It was not unusual in Ireland for a priest to be involved in politics yet, with the benefit of hindsight, modern historians can see how such a situation might have increased tensions between landlord and tenant. Terence Dooley considers that this was especially the case in Ulster, where landowners looked to the Orange Order to provide a buffer between them and the tenants’ agitation.57 For W.E. Vaughan, ‘the one incontestable fact that emerges is that 1879 was the only year of serious agricultural depression that found a united and powerful political leadership, ready to exploit agrarian discontent.’58 Though the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and President of the Land League, Charles Stewart Parnell – himself a member of the landlord class – may have believed that successful land agitation might pave the way for Home Rule, J.S. Donnelly Jr has made clear that many landlords realised by 1879 that reorganisation might well be necessary for survival.59 R.F. Foster has further observed that ‘some of the more astute among them began to see that land reform, and land purchase, might be their only hope’.60 Yet, the involvement of the priest was a stumbling block; Foster sees the ‘rapid identification of the movement with a revanchist Roman Catholic Church and with the drive for denominational education’ combined with ‘the language of social revolution and expropriation’ as a real barrier to reform.61
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