May, Lou & Cass

by Sophia Hillan

  How they go wrangling on about the address to the Queen’s speech, wasting all this time, instead of making stringent laws to enforce the Queen’s laws in Ireland, & to punish severely & immediately, every rebel who makes disloyal, treasonable speeches urging the Tenants to rob their Landlords more than many of them have already done.32

  However kind and sympathetic they may have been to individual tenants or their families in distress, none of the Knight family would have supported a tenant against a landlord. In Chawton, at about the same time, her nephew Montagu Knight’s agent questioned a prospective tenant on his politics and religion to make sure they accorded with those of the landlord, and Montagu kept a cutting describing the incident in his family scrapbook.33 Maria Edgeworth, the pioneering novelist who had so completely understood the world of the tenantry that she could write Castle Rackrent as though she were one of them, had described many years earlier how she collected punitive fines from two Edgeworthstown tenants she had known all her life. They had voted against the interests of the family because it had been required by their parish priest and, though tears ran down her cheeks and she felt ‘it was all shameful’, Maria Edgeworth had no doubt where her loyalty lay.34

  Marianne Knight was no different. While she condemned and required punishment for her nephew’s rebellious tenants, she was at the same time sending a regular sum from her small annuity to an elderly and ailing former gardener to the family in Chawton. Yet, if the old Chawton gardener had in any way defied the family, she would undoubtedly have called for his punishment even if, like Maria Edgeworth, she felt the tears come to her eyes as she did so. It is a curious if revealing contradiction: Marianne knew what it was to face losing her house, and did not forget her father’s old servant, or his family, in their time of need. Yet, she could not extend this compassion to the poverty-stricken tenants facing eviction on her nephew’s land because they, like the mutinous Indians who had threatened the lives of her nephews thirty years earlier, were ‘rebels’.

  Her real concern, however, much deeper than her views on the Irish question, was Louisa’s health. In the spring of 1887, even as she awaited a visit from the Wards of Isle O’Valla, she feared Louisa might not be able for the visit. ‘My dearest sister is only pretty well,’ she wrote. ‘She is very unequal to much talking & I am afraid will often have to retire upstairs & take refuge in her bedroom for a time to rest her head.’35 A year later, she continued to be concerned. On 10 April 1888 she wrote again to Montagu and Florence, the dry irony of her tone recalling the wry amusement of her famous aunt. Once she settled into life in Ballyare, she tried to give the impression to her family that she was once more Miss Knight of Godmersham and Chawton, largely unaffected by much beyond the vicissitudes of the weather, finding her happiness in the house and garden about her, and in news from her family:

  Many thanks for your letter & enclosure, giving me the interesting news of Mrs Fletcher’s arrival in London from Paris, loaded with novelties for dresses, bonnets &c &c for the coming spring, if it ever arrives! Your weather does not sound like it, I must confess. Ours is, I hope, improving. We have had no snow, showers or frost for some days, tho’ the wind still persists in the North and East; but there is very little of it, & when the sun condescends to shine out, it is pleasant enough. Everything is very backward, which probably saves their lives. We have had delicious violets in the garden for some days, & now the beds are filling fast with daffodil bulbs — Hyacinths in full bloom, Narcissus, Jonquil, a few tulips & polyanthus besides wallflowers: so the borders just outside the drawing room window look quite gay and springlike.36

  The letter, bright and optimistic in tone is, nonetheless, deceptive. While relishing the doings of her nieces and nephews and all their children as far away as India, remembering who was getting married, who was rowing for Oxford, who was playing in the cricket team against the villagers, Marianne was uneasy. At the end of her letter, she added a postscript which shows something of her efforts to spare her family the knowledge that Louisa was far from well: ‘We go on very peacefully here. My drst Sister still suffers sadly from acute inflammation, otherwise she is really well.’37 When next she wrote, in May 1888, it was with the same fluent ease and sharp-edged humour that Jane employed in her letters to her sister Cassandra, as though they were together in the same room. Yet, there is a difference: she no longer tried to minimise the degree of Louisa’s illness. Marianne’s expressions here, such as the archaic ‘thanky’ for ‘thank you’, are reminders that she was just a few years short of ninety, not as strong as the voice in her letters would suggest and, for the first time, dreading the prospect of travelling. This was a woman, increasingly fearful of the future, trying not to sound lonely for her old home and the life she knew:

  What good pens you always get. I wish I did. How do you manage, I wonder? Thanky kindly for your letter received yest’y. I like so much hearing about you all, & I seldom do it seems to me. No, I have not made any plans for the summer, and have no idea what I am likely to do yet. Many thanks for your kind say about Chawton, if I do visit England I will gladly avail myself of your noble invitation — but the long, weary journey begins to frighten me & I feel as I approach the 87th year of my reign that I am neither as young, or as strong, as I used to be.38

  Though by the end of June 1888, Louisa had been well enough to be ‘carried downstairs and into the garden the 3 last days, and staid longer each time — yest’y more than 2 hours, & not too tired after a good rest on her bed’, Marianne does not appear to have travelled to England that summer. The ‘lovely, bright sunny days’ in Donegal reminded her of England’s ‘beautiful Jubilee weather’ the previous year, which, she said, ‘I have not forgotten.’39 A year later, she chose to believe her sister was stronger, ‘excepting her side & leg which were first attacked’, but added, a little despondently: ‘I fear there is no improvement in them, or very, very little,’ and then, in a brief return to her old, teasing manner, she wrote: ‘I don’t know what I shall do; pick up, join you in Scotland, & get a little shooting!’40 By her next letter, dated 9 July 1888, the old Chawton gardener Richard Knight had died, and she wrote offering to continue her regular remittance in order to help his widow. It was a generous offer, from one who had little. Indeed, almost as though she did not wish to dwell on this act of generosity she moved quickly to safer topics. She was a countrywoman at heart, and had always been used, not least in her capacity as mistress of her father’s estate at Godmersham, to the rhythm of the seasons: she understood the importance of the opening of the fields, and the later saving of the harvest: ‘The weather continues dull & showery,’ she wrote, ‘the meadows were to have been begun today but it was decided to wait a little longer — I hope the new moon may do us some good: the last was a very bad one.’41

  The next letter is dated May 1889, three months after the murder of Inspector Martin. Marianne, though she must have been aware of all that had happened, did not refer to it even obliquely for, by then, Louisa was extremely ill:

  She has slept well for several nights which is a great blessing; her appetite has been better, and she has not complained of breathlessness lately. We are indeed most truly thankful for this gracious answer to our prayers. She is still very weak; but she gets up, & is wheeled into her dressing room every day, where she remains lying on the bed for 2 or 3 hours which refreshes and amuses her. She can’t talk much at a time, on acct of her head, or be talked to for long, but we must not expect too much, & we are very thankful for God’s great goodness to us in hearing & granting our prayers.42

  The condition of her last sister, indeed her last sibling, continued to be Marianne’s main preoccupation in that volatile time of 1889. Though she made light of it, she was beginning to feel her age: ‘I am very well, thanky, except not being as strong as I was, having pains occasionally in my back; which as I am nearly 100 is not odd.’43 By 10 June 1889, she was prepared to travel as far as County Down to visit Norah Ward. Louisa’s state, she wrote, was ‘so critical that
I cannot make up my mind to leave her for more than a few days, unless she makes greater progress this week than she has done’. Only if she received very encouraging reports of her sister from Cassandra, she said, would she travel on to England.44

  After ‘a comfortable report ... of dear At. Lou’, she made the journey, and her next letter, of 29 June 1889, sent to her nephew Montagu from 58 Eccleston Square in London, showed her to be in excellent spirits. ‘I hope to present myself at good old Chawton on Tuesday next,’ she told him, ‘& to regale you & Florence with my company for a fortnight, if you can bear with me for so long.’ Yet, she was feeling the effects of the journey: ‘I am grown (really) old enough to be everybody’s Grand-Mother, & am as deaf as an adder, as blind as a beetle, and as weak as a wagtail.’ She was much less active, postponing some family visits she had engaged to make, and making a point of asking for Montagu’s help in getting herself and her luggage to his ‘venerable Mansion’.45 By 10 July she was at Dover, once more in good spirits as she wrote to Florence thanking her for the ‘delicious visit’ she had passed at Chawton, and describing a meeting which might have come straight from the pages of a Jane Austen novel:

  I was too early at the Station & had to walk up & down the platform many times, to avoid Mrs Howlett who pounced upon me as soon as I appeared; I did not know her at all, & she had to tell me her name — her ‘Caro Sposo’ was there, busy taking train tickets & I did not speak to him; I suppose they went 2nd or 3rd Class, as I saw no more of them save a passing glance & bow at Waterloo.46

  It serves as another reminder that, like her sisters, Marianne, for all her compassion and understanding of human nature, never forgot her station in society. However precarious her own circumstances, she was still Miss Knight, and she did not choose to mix, any more than Emma Woodhouse did, with this latter-day Mrs Elton, or her ‘Caro Sposo’. When she reached London, she enjoyed the company of her nephews Augustus and George Hill, ‘cabbed about’, forgot her umbrella in a shop, had the pleasure of having it returned beautifully wrapped up, and altogether had a delightful holiday. A note of anxiety creeps in at the end of the letter, however: ‘I haven’t heard from Ballyare again, wh[ich] I hope means good news.’47

  It did not. Her next letter to Florence, two days after her eighty-eighth birthday, was warm and open, telling her she ‘lov’d both [their] dear affec’ate letters very much’.48 In common with the rest of her family, Marianne had always relished the celebration of her birthday: she had, after all, once been brought to the theatre by Jane Austen to mark the occasion. For the first time, however, she did not feel like celebrating. While Marianne was in England, Louisa, in her eighty-fifth year, had died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage: 49

  My birthday this year was indeed a sadly different one from any of its predecessors: I missed my darling last Sister, as I have done, & still do miss her every hour of every day; though at the same time I try to be truly thankful to our merciful God for His Goodness to her in releasing her from her suffering, weary life here: if I had returned in time to have seen & kissed her once more, I shd be more thankful, & I cannot help grieving for my absence, but God’s will be done. He orders everything for the best. Augustus & George are still here, & are of the greatest use to Cass’ra as well as a great comfort to both of us — I hope they will stay some time longer — George looks pale & ill poor dear, but is pretty well I think. Arthur & his wife & 1 girl staid here about a week, & then went to Gweedore, taking Cass with them & George joined them there a little later, & Aug’s & I kept house here together for nearly ten days, when they all returned, & the Arthurs went home soon after; he seemed well satisfied with his visit & reception, though I am afraid it has not brought him in any more money yet.50

  As usual, Marianne concerned herself what had happened in the family, not with the implications of her own last observation. Yet, it seems to be a fact that Arthur viewed his estate in Donegal purely as a business. If money did not come in, the business would require restructuring, and the position of his aunt and sister might become even more tenuous. The family, from Edward Austen Knight onward, had not laid great store by any attachment of aunts and sisters to properties which were not paying their way. So, while Marianne moved straight on to the September weather and its effect on the harvest – ‘little sunshine, but happily not much rain lately, and the harvest progresses I hope satisfactorily tho’ slowly’ – and though she tried to show interest in the engagement of one of the younger members of the family about to be married, she struggled to find her old enthusiasm. ‘I suppose somebody has left him a good property,’ she wrote, ‘& I am glad of it, my coffee pot will do very well’. 51

  Unsurprisingly, she seems to have been very depressed or, as Margaret Knight had once described it, ‘under it all’. Louisa’s dying while she was absent from home might have accounted by itself for Marianne’s low spirits, yet there was another cause. On the inside of the envelope of her birthday letter, she had written a note to her favourite nephew: ‘1000 thanks d’st. Monty for yr most kind invite to me — I hope to be able to accept it’. Montagu had offered Marianne a home at Chawton if she should have to leave Ballyare. He had not, however, extended the invitation to Cassandra:

  Cass sends her love & bids me say to Monty that as he does not invite her to go to Chawton with me, she shall do her best to make other plans for herself, or stay on here!! I cd not live anywhere else happily: this place is so full of dear At. Lou, I shd. hate to leave it & Cass could not live here alone.52

  It was all happening again, a grim repetition of Marianne’s experience after the deaths first of her father, then her brother Charles, when she had written to Fanny: ‘I can’t live by myself.’ Now, Cassandra Hill, who had been, on her first birthday, the whole family’s ‘poor little darling’, became the latest woman in Jane Austen’s family to face the likelihood of losing the only home she had ever known.53

  It was a time of evictions; Arthur, unable to outwit McFadden, and watching his chances of recovery diminish with each successive land act, had to consider his position in Donegal. By implication, this meant that he had also to consider the position of his aunt and his sister and, while they did not face, like Arthur’s tenants, the misery of watching while the roof was removed or the door broken down by a battering ram, they too were facing eviction. Marianne, with more experience of the process than most of her family, had cause to be depressed. On 28 September, she wrote directly to Montagu to thank him for his offer of a home at Chawton, and to tell him how matters stood with his cousin Arthur. Her tone was kind and friendly as, necessarily practical, she accepted his invitation for herself without mentioning his omission of Cassandra. Her niece’s spirited declaration of independence had already been conveyed through Florence and, while she continued to worry about Cassandra, Marianne could not afford to refuse her only offer of a home:

  Your most kind letter must be answered at once with 1000 thanks from me to Florence as well as to your dear self for offering me your own beloved home as a safe & comfortable refuge for my old age if I leave this — nothing decided can be known till November when Arthur will examine his accts & discover whether we have lived within our income or not, and act accordingly. If we may stay on here, I had rather do so: the place is so full of reminiscences of my last darling Sister. I shd very much grieve to leave it and so wd. Cass’ra for many reasons — at the same time if we have to go, I shall be delighted to accept your most kind and affectionate offer … if I am spared, I trust to pay you all a visit in the spring.54

  A week earlier, Marianne had written another letter of thanks for birthday greetings, this time to Edward Bridges Rice, the eldest of Lizzy’s fifteen children. As a young girl still in her teens, she had assisted Lizzy at Edward’s birth in 1819 and, a year later, when Fanny and Lizzy went to London to choose Fanny’s wedding clothes, the child had been left in her charge. He must have referred to this in his letter, for Marianne, so stoic since her last sister’s death, briefly became the light-hearted, joyous you
ng girl who had climbed with her sister to the top of the cow-house, and danced in white slippers at the first ball of her life:

  Yes! I had the honor [sic] to teach you to walk in the dear old Library at my darling home; we were near the little low white door when you took your first step alone to my great delight — dearest Mama had gone to London to help Aunt Knatchbull choose her wedding finery, & you were left with me & drst Grandpapa & Cakey — Oh dear! It wrings my old wizened heart to think of those blissful times passed in our beloved Paradise — I cannot write much so please to excuse a short stupid letter.55

  Seventy years had narrowed the gap in their ages: now they were ailing, and in the winter of their lives, the past brighter and more real for both of them than the exhausting present. Cassandra too, though forty years Marianne’s junior, had been suffering from low spirits since the death of Louisa and the consequent uncertainty of her future, and went to stay with her sister Norah at Isle O’Valla. It was well that she was there, for something happened which meant that she had to support Norah, rather than have Norah cheer her. Somerset Ward had sustained a serious injury, ‘having been dragged on the ground about 40 yards or so by his runaway horse, & concussion of the brain following’.56 Cassandra, who had once considered opening a nursing home, was well able to care for her brother-in-law and her sister, for Norah became ill with the shock. Yet Marianne, who now depended on her niece as her father had once depended on her, did not feel happy until Cassandra came home. When she did, however sorry she was for the Wards, Marianne was ‘delighted to have her back again’.57