Jane Austen

by Fiona Stafford

  Emma Watson’s resistance to the idea of pursuing a husband ‘merely for the sake of situation’ conveys a degree of anger at the predicament of women whose adult lives depended wholly on their ability to attract a sufficiently well-heeled man. Nor is her objection countered by her sister’s wishful thinking: ‘I think I could like any good humoured Man with a comfortable Income.’ The difference of opinion points to Jane Austen’s views on the matter, which would be spelt out with unequivocal clarity ten years later, in November 1814, when she counselled her niece Fanny Knight against any thought of marriage if she found herself still harbouring doubts about her feelings towards it: ‘Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.’ Despite the pressures so graphically portrayed in ‘The Watsons’, in which the need to secure a future home and husband turns Emma’s sisters into desperate rivals, Jane Austen seems to have believed firmly that no one should marry without love. She had no illusions, however, about the difficulties facing those unlucky enough to be forced into the pursuit of love and failing to find it. This story, which she began after completing Northanger Abbey, addressed a problem she would revisit imaginatively throughout her life.

  Jane Austen was a single woman living in a rented house with her sister and parents when she wrote ‘The Watsons’, but she could have been a wife and mistress of a country mansion in Hampshire. Two years earlier, in 1802, she had accepted a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, younger brother of her close friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg. She had been staying with the Bigg sisters at Manydown Park, on the way back from seeing Edward in Kent, when Harris, whom she had known since childhood, took the opportunity to ask Jane to marry him. She said ‘yes’ at once, but, by the very next morning, had changed her mind. Why? The most likely explanation is that she spent a very restless night agonising over her decision, before coming to the conclusion that she was not in love with Harris and was never likely to be. No amount of fondness for him, or for his sisters, could compensate for the absence of real, passionate love. He might be a good companion, he might inherit a wonderful estate only a few miles from Steventon, but she knew that it was better to remain a spinster, with a limited income and no permanent home, than to marry without the deepest emotional attachment. Her later advice to Fanny Knight was founded on personal conviction.

  In 1802, Jane Austen was probably still hoping to fall in love with someone who might turn out to be her future husband. Even if Marianne Dashwood considered a woman of twenty-seven to be well past the age at which she might hope to inspire affection in a man, Jane Austen knew that plenty of people found romantic fulfilment beyond their early twenties. Eliza had not married Henry until 1797, when she was thirty-six. Whether Jane Austen suffered from the kind of feelings attributed to Elizabeth in ‘The Watsons’ (‘A heart wounded like yours can have little inclination for Matrimony’) is not known. Her early flirtation with Tom Lefroy has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, inspiring a book, a film and an enormous amount of speculation.36 The evidence relating to her emotional life, however, is frustratingly sparse. As so often, the few known facts are interesting enough to generate plenty of lively, imaginative interpretations, but are insufficient for establishing a full, authoritative account of crucial moments in her life. It seems just as possible that Jane Austen was in love with someone whose name has never been identified. Or she may have had a sequence of secret passions, the details of which were wisely kept from her extended family and would hardly have survived in her letters.

  Little is known about the acquaintances, new friends or eligible bachelors whom Jane may have met during the years after the family moved from Hampshire. Though based in Bath, the Austens had holidays in Devonshire, Dorset and Sussex, admiring the scenery, swimming in the sea and, inevitably, attending parties in the fashionable seaside resorts. Long after Jane Austen’s death, Cassandra admitted to their niece Caroline that her sister had fallen in love with a ‘very charming man’ (‘I never heard Aunt Cass speak of anyone else with such admiration’)37 whom she had met on one of their summer visits to the coast. Apparently, they planned to continue seeing each other after the Austens went back to Bath, but the man, whose name remains a mystery, had died soon afterwards. If this experience belonged to the first summer trip to Sidmouth in 1801, it may have had a bearing on Jane Austen’s initial confusion over Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal. It may also have altered her emotional life and general outlook for ever. But equally, it may not.

  The impressions of Jane Austen that emerge from the early recollections suggest a person whose uneventful life remained largely untroubled by romantic entanglements, and whose devotion to her family and her writing was completely absorbing. Nevertheless, Henry Austen, James Edward Austen-Leigh and Caroline Austen all describe her as a very attractive woman. Her brother’s account, written within months of his sister’s death, describes her graceful way of moving, her fine complexion, her sweet voice and the delightfully expressive face that displayed so openly the ‘cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence, which were her real characteristics’.38 Her nephew’s memories, though recorded half a century later, seem just as warm: ‘In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face.’39 Although he considered Aunt Jane less ‘regularly handsome’ than Aunt Cassandra, he was alert to her special attractions: ‘[H]er countenance had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders.’ Such a woman would hardly have failed to attract admirers. Caroline, too, was clear that her aunt was ‘established as a very pretty girl, in the opinion of most of her neighbours’.40 Jane Austen clearly enjoyed parties and met plenty of men – perhaps she cared for none of them? With no direct account of Jane Austen’s private feelings, we can do nothing but speculate.

  What is certain, however, is that when she represented the processes of love and courtship in her mature novels, she was able to capture the feelings of her heroines with unprecedented literary skill. It is hard to imagine a writer who had never been in love conveying Marianne Dashwood’s sufferings with such care and sympathy, or depicting the overwhelming joy felt by Anne Elliot at the end of Persuasion. Throughout her mature fiction, the mysterious effects of love and desire are explored with an understanding that enables readers to respond to each heroine’s emotional twists and turns as if she were a real person. Jane Austen’s generous treatment of misconstrued attention or misplaced affection may result entirely from acute observation of those around her, but it seems unlikely. There may not be any definitive revelatory statement in a journal, or even in private letters, but Jane Austen left the evidence of her deep personal knowledge of the human heart in every one of the novels she published.

  As for ‘The Watsons’, Austen may have abandoned it because it was addressing issues that potentially seemed too close to her own situation, or she may have been too distracted by a packed social diary and her frequent holidays and trips to visit family and friends. It is also possible that, as a serious writer, she knew her story just was not working. The non-publication of ‘Susan’ cannot have helped stimulate renewed creative energy, but there were plenty of other reasons for her to sink into low spirits. Mrs Austen’s anxieties about her own health, which had often been something of a trial to her daughters (‘she sometimes complains of an Asthma, a Dropsy, Water in her Chest & a Liver Disorder’), had become a real cause for concern since the onset of a more dangerous illness.41 Although she recovered, the comic verse Jane wrote to celebrate paradoxically reveals the attack’s seriousness: ‘Says Death, “I’ve been trying these three weeks or more / To seize an old Madam here at Number Four.”’42 Death may have been disappointed on this occasion, but now that Mrs Austen was in her sixties, the possibility of things turning out differently next time was only too real.

  Mrs Austen may have encouraged the family to laugh in the face of death, but there were sit
uations in which even the most advanced sense of humour was powerless to help. Hastings’s death in October 1801, at the age of fifteen, brought grief not only on account of the loss of the boy himself, but also for the thoughts it prompted about Jane’s brother George, who had suffered from fits in his childhood so much like those that had afflicted Eliza’s unlucky son. Three years later, Jane Austen’s twenty-ninth birthday was darkened by the news that Mrs Lefroy had been killed suddenly when her horse had bolted during a routine shopping expedition to Overton. The extraordinary accident brought back painful memories of Jane Cooper’s early death in a crashed carriage in 1798. But the worst was still to come. Within a month of Mrs Lefroy’s fall, Jane Austen’s father was dead.

  Jane wrote at once to tell her brother Frank, describing the suddenness of their father’s decline into ‘fever, violent tremulousness, & the greatest degree of Feebleness’.43 For once, all her comic energy was suspended. The comfort offered to her brother, whose shock she so thoughtfully anticipated, gives a rare insight into Jane Austen’s own ultimate source of strength and consolation: her faith in her father’s intrinsic goodness and his ‘constant preparation for another World’. During the harrowing hours of his illness, Jane had joined her sister and mother in fervent prayers for his release from suffering, and, in the aftermath, she was similarly sustained by her faith. Nevertheless, the magnitude of her loss, and its practical effects on those left behind, cast a very dark cloud over her early thirties.

  The death of George Austen left his widow and daughters in difficult circumstances. They remained in Bath for about a year, in more modest accommodation in Gay Street, before moving to Southampton, where Frank had set up home after his marriage to Mary Gibson in June 1806. When Frank went away to sea again the following year, his mother and sisters moved in, staying for the next two years. Although Jane had always been very conscious of Frank’s naval career, living with his wife and helping care for their baby brought home the daily dangers of life at sea and the enormous relief of the captain’s shore leave.

  The years in Southampton, with Portsmouth nearby, gave Jane Austen her first experience of life in a major port, full of news about British engagements overseas and the progress of the war. She saw first-hand the great warships packed with men and cannon, the trading vessels and passenger boats, and the huge variety of people who filled the quayside. Southampton had its share of elegant buildings and balls, but the sense of purpose that galvanised so much activity at the harbour in Portsmouth offered a striking contrast to the leisurely and often ailing society of Bath. The final words of Jane Austen’s last complete novel celebrate the domestic virtues and national importance of the British navy. Just as her earliest writings were meant as presents for her family, so too would she eventually use her published works to pay tribute to those whose support had meant so much to her, and whose merits she held in such high esteem.

  If Frank had rescued his mother and sisters from the insecurities of temporary lodging by welcoming them into his growing household, it was Edward who eventually gave them a home of their own. His own life was shattered in 1808 by the sudden death of his wife Elizabeth a few days after giving birth. Cassandra was staying with the family at Godmersham when the devastating blow struck, leaving Edward inconsolable and his eleven children without a mother. While Cassandra tried to comfort Fanny and her little brothers and sisters, the two eldest boys, who were at school in Winchester, went to stay with Aunt Jane in Southampton. A letter to Cassandra written on 24 October describes Jane’s efforts to divert their nephews with ‘spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards’, but also makes reference to their own ‘plans’. By October 1808, Mrs Austen and her daughters were being given the choice of moving to one of the smaller houses on Edward’s estates in either Kent or Hampshire. They plumped for the latter, at Chawton, a few miles from Steventon, and, over the next few months, the plans turned into serious preparations.

  The prospect of the move prompted Jane Austen to take positive action. After years of wondering what had happened to ‘Susan’, she decided to write to Crosby on 5 April 1809 asking whether they had lost the manuscript, signing her letter ‘MAD’ (‘Mrs Ashton Dennis, Post Office, Southampton’). Her offer to replace it with another copy was answered curtly by Richard Crosby, who informed her that his firm was under no obligation to publish the novel, but it would take proceedings against any other publisher who did so. If she wanted to recover ownership of her work, she would need to reimburse Crosby the £10 originally paid for ‘Susan’. Although Jane Austen abandoned the matter for the time being, her decision to get to grips with a situation that had been in unsatisfactory suspension for six years suggests a renewed sense of determination and a reviving optimism about her writing. Once safely installed at Chawton, if not with a room of her own, then at least with some space to write, Jane Austen began work on another novel. ‘Susan’ was imprisoned in a publisher’s vault in London and Emma Watson had been abandoned, but there were other stories that Jane had drafted more than ten years before. ‘Elinor and Marianne’ came out of the cupboard and started to take on a new life, just as their author was doing.

  Whatever Jane Austen had imagined for the two sisters in the middle of the 1790s could now be developed with far greater depth thanks to her experiences over the intervening years. Her new novel provided an opportunity to deal with the painful questions of parental death and expulsion from the family home and, although so many details concerning the Dashwood family were quite different from her own, the circumstances that now propelled the plot were things that Jane Austen knew about from direct exposure. Her fictional account of Mrs Dashwood and her daughters being offered a cottage on the estate of a wealthy relative has an obvious connection to personal events. The brief description of the Dashwoods’ new home in Devonshire as being a ‘comfortable and compact’ house, though ‘defective’ as a cottage, would have fitted Chawton Cottage, with its square-brick frontage, equally accurately.

  The glimpse of the daughters ‘endeavouring, by placing around them their books and other possessions, to form themselves a home’ also allows an insight into Jane Austen’s idea of what was most important in making unfamiliar surroundings feel homely. She had had plenty of experience placing books and other possessions into new rooms over the preceding eight years, but settling into Chawton Cottage carried an air of permanence. After the restless years in Bath and Southampton, with the numerous journeys to other towns and other people’s houses, the Austen sisters had come to a halt in a small country village, not very far from the one in which they had grown up. It was a new stage of life, but it was also a return to something deeply familiar. Just as William Wordsworth was finding the rediscovery of his childhood home in the Lake District enormously reinvigorating, so too did Jane Austen’s return to Hampshire provide the stimulus for the extraordinary creative outpouring of the next eight years.

  SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND

  PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

  1809–13

  The first conversation between Elinor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility explores the benefits and disadvantages of gradual maturity. Jane Austen had already begun to use fictional dialogue as a way of presenting opposing views on important issues in both Northanger Abbey and ‘The Watsons’, and now she developed this technique in the novel she began to revise soon after her arrival in Chawton. When Elinor expresses her hopes that ‘a few years’ will modify her younger sister’s romantic notions and ‘settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of common sense and observation’, Colonel Brandon replies, with surprising warmth, ‘No, no, do not desire it, – for when the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous!’ The exchange is reminiscent of Henry Tilney’s admiration of Catherine Morland’s innocent enthusiasm for the pleasures of Bath, but, in Sense and Sensibility, it is complicated by the focus on Marianne Dashwood, and the relative ages of Eli
nor and Colonel Brandon. Instead of the case for experience and rationality being made by the middle-aged, well-travelled military man, it is being argued by a young woman only two years older than the girl whose opinions she so confidently regards as being among the childish things that must be put away. The scene reveals not only Jane Austen’s maturing style, but also her awareness that growing older can bring perils of its own. Elinor Dashwood might believe, from the advanced age of nineteen, that additional years inevitably beget good sense, but Colonel Brandon is able to voice the possibility that age might do nothing more than induce the jaded or commonplace.

  For a creative writer, the thought that the idealistic or imaginative must inevitably be crushed by the rational and known was not necessarily something to celebrate. Even less welcome was the notion that the bright gleam of originality invariably faded into the light of common day. As Jane Austen reread the work she had first conceived fourteen years earlier, she was confronted with hard questions about whether the intervening period had brought the advantages anticipated by Elinor or the limitations observed by Colonel Brandon. If her novel was to succeed, she needed to find a way of retaining its early energy while restraining its excesses. As her writing developed, Jane Austen recognised that there were different ways of creating original works of art and that the skills acquired from experience and experimentation were ultimately as important as the initial sparks of inspiration. In Sense and Sensibility, however, the different elements that fuse with such powerful results in her mature fiction are seen as conflicting tendencies. Was imagination invariably at odds with reason? Impulsiveness with restraint? Sense with sensibility? The pain sustained by both the heroines, and by so many others in the novel, is indicative of the seriousness of a problem that was both artistic and moral. Jane Austen resolutely tackled the inherent difficulties of revising old work that somehow embodies a younger self, and, in the next work she prepared for publication, the mood is very much lighter and less troubled.