As a child, Jane Austen was part of a family that provided all the security of connection and continuity, but also instilled an awareness of separation and perpetual change. With such lively relations, there was constant amusement, intellectual stimulation and companionship, but only very rarely would everyone have gathered under the same roof. The span of fourteen years between the births of the oldest and youngest Austens meant that James was already setting off for Oxford in the year that Charles was born. George’s strange exclusion must also have heightened his sister’s sense of the lottery of human existence and the fragility of her own place in a world in which one child could be blessed with grace and ability and another with neither. Gratitude for good health and natural gifts, as well as compassionate understanding of those afflicted with difficulties, formed part of Jane Austen’s psyche from her earliest years – and informed the novels she would write in later life.
In addition to George’s absence, she also had to contend with some abrupt departures. When she was only eight, Edward was adopted by a wealthy, childless relative of their father, one Thomas Knight of Godmersham Park in Kent. From Mr Knight’s point of view, his action was very generous: relieving his second cousin from the expense of educating at least one of numerous sons, and guaranteeing the boy a secure future with a gentleman’s estate and social standing. Unlike Francis and Charles, who had to earn their place in the world by entering a dangerous profession and working hard to impress their commanding officers, Edward’s prosperous future seemed to have appeared from nowhere. It was a reward for nothing more than a healthy constitution and his position as a younger son (though not too much younger). Once again, the arbitrary but profound differences in people’s lives must have made a deep impression on his sister. The wrench of separation also demanded strategies of psychological self-defence, contributing, perhaps, to a fear of relying too heavily on even those who were most dear.
When Frank followed Edward out of the family home in 1786 to train as a naval officer, the same feelings of loss were compounded by anxiety. The hazards facing a young midshipman did not require as vivid an imagination as Jane Austen’s to provoke the most profound fears, and so, when the twelve-year-old boy went cheerfully away to serve king and country, his sister must have wondered whether she would ever see him again. Mustering a proper pride in Frank’s courage and sense of patriotic duty demanded considerable effort in such circumstances. By the time Charles emulated Frank’s example in 1791, the fifteen-year-old girl was faced with an even harder task of waving off her little brother into military service just before the outbreak of a war in which naval battles were to prove crucial to the British campaign.
Not all the fraternal exits were quite so traumatic, however. James and Henry both went up to Oxford and came home safely and frequently. James and Edward both enjoyed extensive continental travels, returning unscathed and full of news of foreign countries. The return of any of the sons was a major event at the parsonage, not only bringing the natural joy of reunion, but also a vital infusion of ideas and stories from beyond rural Hampshire. For, although Steventon and the surrounding parishes were full of other large families with their own share of births, marriages, deaths and human incidents, there were inevitably times when the tiny village seemed rather quiet. The cycle of the seasons created the natural pattern of the year, while the church calendar guided the regular services given by Reverend Austen and attended by his family. Life at the Steventon rectory was measured by the annual Christian festivals – Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Whitsun, Trinity, Michaelmas, Advent and Christmas – as well as being marked by the yearly challenges of the farm and field: ploughing, drilling, lambing, haymaking, harvesting, partridge-shooting and foxhunting.
In a rural community, the vagaries of the English weather are particularly important, and, since George Austen had a farm to run, as well as full responsibilities as a minister of the church, the conditions determining good and bad harvests were more than just a matter for conversation. For a little girl, however, the changes in the seasons mainly brought different clothes and activities. During the cold and dark winters, once the excitement over the beauty of frosted cobwebs or a sudden deluge of snow had faded, it must have seemed a lifetime before the days started to lighten and last longer again. Sewing samplers, reading books and playing games could pass the time quite happily, but anything that broke into the frozen months between October and March was very welcome indeed.
When James, the pioneer of journeys into the wider world, came home for the vacation in 1782, he threw himself into amateur dramatics. Oxford had put him in touch with contemporary fashions, and one of the enthusiasms sweeping eighteenth-century England was the vogue for private theatres. The Steventon rectory might not have been as capacious as some of the country houses in which miniature versions of London playhouses were being installed, but it had a sizeable parlour and a barn, so why not a makeshift stage? Unlike the Bertram family in Mansfield Park, the Austens were fortunate in having parents who encouraged their children’s creative talents, and thus constituted an audience rather than an obstacle. Mrs Austen may have been given to spending time on the sofa, like Lady Bertram, but she was also a very lively woman with a real facility for witty verses, sharing a delight in wordplay and comedy with her children. George Austen was a highly educated man, a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, before his marriage, and he remained keen to maintain his wide intellectual pursuits and literary enthusiasms, as well as to nurture the budding ability of the next generation. In order to help make ends meet as his family increased in size, he offered rooms and private tuition to young gentlemen. Often his pupils went home in the holidays, but those who were still in residence provided the possibility of a larger cast for the family theatricals. Among the earliest productions at Steventon was a tragedy called Matilda, in which Thomas Fowle, a residential student who would later propose to Cassandra, read the epilogue. Mostly, however, the plays offered opportunities for the Austens themselves to showcase their talents and have a lot of fun.
It must have been very exciting for Jane to watch her elder brothers performing Sheridan’s hilarious comedy The Rivals, which had first been staged at Covent Garden in 1775, and to be introduced at such an early age to the memorably muddled Mrs Malaprop and to the imaginative world of Lydia Languish, which so completely eclipsed the real one. Jane was both an integral part of the family and an eager observer, by virtue of being too young to be given a role. She would have enjoyed the final production, but also have witnessed the hours of preparation that went into such an ambitious play – the boys learning lines, rehearsing scenes, setting up props and developing stage accents. To produce a convincing fiction for a single evening, vast effort, time and co-operation were required. But it was well worth it, for here was a chance to delight a sympathetic audience, make people laugh and demonstrate personal abilities. The plays at Steventon gave James Austen the opportunity to recite his own compositions alongside those of the best playwright of the age – a thrilling idea for his exceptionally talented little sister. On the stage, new identities could be assumed, and anything seemed possible – a point especially evident in The Rivals, in which the actor cast as Jack Absolute had to play Jack playing Ensign Beverley. Jane would have been laughing, but also learning, because the very idea of a pretend persona was out of the question in the kind of community where everyone had known everyone else since birth. This was a world complete in itself, operating according to the playful internal logic of Sheridan’s drama. The theatre at Steventon, though only a family affair, demonstrated to the younger Austen children just what art could mean, even in the most confined and remote places.
The scripts chosen by James for family performances offered both entertainment and education. For the young Jane Austen, however, observation of the human interactions during rehearsals must have been just as instructive. One person’s eagerness to dominate the stage, another’s reluctance to participate, endless disputes over casting – all the details that
are so well observed in Mansfield Park were in evidence at Steventon during her childhood. When Eliza de Feuillide entered the scene for the Christmas production of 1786, the atmosphere intensified as the usual tiffs and reconciliations took on a decidedly flirtatious edge.
Eliza was the daughter of George Austen’s sister Philadelphia, who had taken the bold decision to risk a long sea journey and tropical climate when she set off for India in 1752. Once landed, she met and married Tysoe Hancock, giving birth to Elizabeth eight years later. When Eliza returned to Europe and married the French aristocrat Comte de Feuillide, she called their son Hastings after her godfather, Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India and close friend of her parents, especially Philadelphia. Whether Warren Hastings was in fact the little boy’s grandfather has often been debated, though the evidence on either side is patchy. Whatever Eliza’s parentage, she certainly made an exotic addition to the male-dominated household at Steventon when she swept in to stay for extended visits during the 1780s. Brought up in India, she was familiar with lands that the Austens had only read about. Married to a French count, she had moved in circles they had only imagined. With her young son and distant husband, she seemed both vulnerable and emancipated. Though some years older than all her Austen cousins, she was young enough and beautiful enough to seem very exciting indeed.
Eliza was prepared not only to join in the family shows, but even to take the leading role in comedies, which meant that the scope for plays – and playing – increased significantly. The epilogue James wrote for Susannah Centlivre’s comedy The Wonder, which Eliza delivered in the 1787 production, is basically a celebration of women and their new freedom from male tyranny:
But thank our happier stars, those days are o’er,
And woman holds second place no more.
Now forced to quit their long held usurpation,
These men all wise, these Lords of the Creation!
To our superior rule themselves submit,
Slaves to our charms, & vassals to our wit;
We can with ease their every sense beguile,
And melt their resolutions with a smile.3
It was quite a change for the Austen brothers, and a startling shift of emphasis for the little sisters. If James was quick to admire Eliza, Henry was even more beguiled by his captivating cousin, and their enjoyment of each other’s company was obvious to everyone. Eliza was ten years older than Henry – and married. However, by 1797, when he reached twenty-six, she had been left a widow and was therefore free to become his wife.
Jane’s cousin introduced an entirely new kind of woman into her mental horizons. Unlike Mrs Austen and so many of their family friends, Eliza seemed free to arrive when she wanted, stay as long as she liked and then disappear again, apparently unencumbered by household management or parental restrictions. In reality, Eliza’s life was far from easy: distress over her husband during the French Revolution and anxiety for their invalid son took their toll. From young Jane’s perspective, however, here was a woman who had seen the world, who spoke French as easily as English, who dressed fashionably and brought Parisian manners to rural Hampshire. She was also fond of her English relations, remaining close to Jane and Cassandra as they grew into womanhood, teaching them things that would otherwise have been well outside their experience.
If Eliza was an exciting addition to the circle, however, it was Cassandra who formed its centre as far as Jane was concerned. Her brothers came and went, leaving havoc in their wake, but Cassandra, Jane’s only sister, remained a constant, vital source of stability throughout her life. The sisters shared a bedroom, a sense of humour and a mutual understanding that sustained them both throughout their lives. Though rarely apart, even as adults, whenever they did find themselves staying in different places, they wrote frequent letters to each other, as if to deny any thought of separation. From their earliest days, Cassandra was Jane’s guide and confidante. As all the family recognised, the girls were everything to each other. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first heroines to appear in Jane Austen’s published works were also sisters. Jane’s attachment to Cassandra was such that, when it was deemed time for Cassandra to receive a more formal education than she was being given at home, Jane was determined to go too. Even though she was only seven, boarding school with Cassandra was better than home without. As her mother commented at the time, ‘If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.’4 In the event, the joke turned rather sour, as both the girls were lucky to survive their schooldays.
Departure from the family home was not, after all, an exclusively male experience. Jane and Cassandra, together with their cousin Jane Cooper, daughter of Mrs Austen’s elder sister, set off for Oxford in the spring of 1783 to be educated by Jane Cooper’s aunt Mrs Cawley, who was the wife of the principal of Brasenose. The ancient city was also the home of their uncle Theophilus Leigh, Master of Balliol and subject of endless college anecdotes. James Austen was there too; like his father before him, he had become a fellow of St John’s. None of this was especially heartening, however, for a seven-year-old girl away from home and surrounded for the first time in her life by the unfamiliar sounds and smells of a city. Mrs Cawley, with her formal manners, would not have seemed much of a substitute for Jane’s mother and father, and the exclusive company of little girls could not have been more different from that of the Austen boys. If Jane had been close to Cassandra before, she now clung to her elder sister for comfort and companionship amid the ‘dismal chapels’ and ‘dusty libraries’ of the medieval seat of learning.5
The summer of 1783 was dark and alarming. Gilbert White, who wrote the famous Natural History of the Hampshire village of Selborne, recalled the unprecedented heat and humidity, the plagues of wasps and the rotting honeysuckle. Even worse were the terrifying meteors, thunderstorms and ‘smokey fog’ that covered the whole of Europe for weeks, ‘a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man’.6 We now know that the cause of these startling phenomena was the massive volcanic eruption of Skaptár-Jökull in Iceland, but for those witnessing them in England in 1783, the disasters seemed biblical in proportion and mysteriousness. For Jane and Cassandra Austen, the strange summer must have been very frightening indeed, but their fears were compounded by the outbreak of illness at Mrs Cawley’s establishment, which led to their sudden removal to Southampton.
The journey from Oxford to the great port on the south coast was slow and tiring, but, upon reaching Southampton (well known for its mild air and healthy sea breezes), the girls would be safe. Or this, presumably, was Mrs Cawley’s plan. In fact, the city was soon afflicted by an epidemic of typhus, which spread alarmingly in the unusually hot summer weather. Despite the danger, Mrs Cawley continued to superintend her charges and decided not to inform their parents, even when both Jane and Cassandra fell seriously ill. It was Jane Cooper who broke the news and, within days of her letter arriving, Mrs Cooper and Mrs Austen were hurrying down to Southampton to collect their children. Jane and Cassandra slowly regained strength at Steventon during the autumn, but Mrs Cooper, who had become infected during her rescue mission, did not survive.
Despite the experiences of 1783, the Austens decided to send their daughters away again two years later, this time to what is now the Abbey School for Girls in Reading. Although the school was part of a ruined abbey, where ghosts reputedly walked and where skeletons were certainly uncovered from time to time, the experience seems to have been generally happier than Jane’s first foray into formal education. Under the slightly eccentric but kindly guidance of Mrs Latournelle, with her distinctive cork leg, Jane and Cassandra practised their spelling and handwriting and learned some basic French and Italian, as well as acquiring other specifically female accomplishments such as needlework and drawing. They also had access to different books in the school library and to very different company in the classroom. Here was an opportunity to make friends independently of the family and to learn about
the various ways in which schoolgirls interact, form close allegiances, compete, console, embrace and exclude one another. Mrs Latournelle’s pupils came from other towns and villages, talked of unknown homes and families, held unfamiliar ideas about the world and different hopes for the future. Although Jane Austen was only in Reading for two years, completing her formal schooling by the time she was eleven, her mental field of vision had already widened immeasurably. All her new experiences, deeply mixed as they were, were laid down to ferment in her rich imagination.
EARLY WRITING
1787–92
Although Jane Austen was not at school for very long, her education extended far beyond what was offered by Mrs Cawley and Mrs Latournelle. As Elizabeth Bennet explains to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, even without schooling or a governess, those who ‘wished to learn, never wanted the means’. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s quick wit and elegant choice of words are not attributed to the kind of formal education deemed appropriate for young ladies, but rather to her intellectual freedom – ‘We were always encouraged to read.’ Once back at home, Jane Austen was similarly at liberty to explore the books owned by her parents and her brothers and to learn from her family’s wide reading and educated tastes. James, in particular, with his love of poetry and classical literature, helped to encourage his sister’s literary flair before his marriage to Anne Mathew in 1792. Not only was James eager to discuss literature, he was also keen to write. In addition to composing prologues for the family theatricals, James wrote elegies and sonnets in the style of contemporary poets such as Shenstone and Bowles, eventually attempting reflective blank verse along the lines of Cowper’s poem ‘The Task’. Equally fashionable, if very different in tone, were James’s charades, which reflected his mother’s comic tastes and aptitude for riddles. When Mr Elton produces his verse puzzle in Emma, he is following a model familiar to Jane Austen since childhood.
Jane Austen Page 2