by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
That hadn’t happened with Jane. She’d been eyed, tentatively, a few times, but the eyes had always kept moving. Already, in 1799, she was writing to her sister, about a ball at nearby Basingstoke, “I do not think I was v. much in request. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it; one’s consequence, you know, varies so much at times w/out apparent reason.”
And that was when she was twenty-three. When her parents gave up their house, she was already twenty-five, and the family had been cognizant that her chances of a marriage proposal were diminishing, geometrically you might say, for years by then. Which meant that they—her parents, her brothers, their wives—would have to support her for the rest of her life.
It crossed no one’s mind that she might actually earn a living. They all knew she wrote; they loved her little pieces. She read them aloud sometimes in the evening, and the family found them charming and funny and delightful. Shortly before the move, her father had even sent “First Impressions”—the early version of Pride and Prejudice—to a London publisher, who sent the manuscript back, unread, by return post. If she was disappointed, we have no record. She bundled that manuscript into a carrying case with the other two, “Elinor and Marianne” (Sense and Sensibility) and “Susan” (Northanger Abbey) and took them with her to Bath. By Greyhound, so to speak—in this case, a sort of stagecoach. Since her parents, on giving over most of their income to her brother, found they could no longer afford a carriage. Thus she was left to depart her lifelong home, with nothing boding well and little more in hand than her manuscripts, her few clothes, and her scrimped little savings, stuffed into a case.
Bad enough, but at one of the stops along the way it was discovered that her case had been transferred to a coach for Southampton, along with some other bags, to be shipped out to the West Indies. A rider went off in pursuit, and arrived just as her case was being loaded onto the ship. If he hadn’t, she’d have lost Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility—but she didn’t, we didn’t. But she almost did. That was her life then. Barely under control.
It was sunny when she and her mother first arrived at Bath, but she hated it at first sight. “I think I see more distinctly through rain,” she wrote to her sister. “The sun was got behind everything, and the appearance of the place was all vapour, shadow, smoke, and confusion.” She mentioned that at her aunt’s, she was given her “room,” in quotations, and then trudged around the next day with her father, looking for suitable places to rent. It seemed there were none to be found that were both somewhat presentable and not creeping with damp.
As for daily life besides the ongoing house hunt, Bath offered the drinking of sulfuric waters, some nice walks when the weather was good, and then, come evening, an unending series of small, repetitious parties, to which Jane Austen, as a less-rich, long-term guest of a quite rich, insatiable aunt and uncle, was obliged each night to trot.
Before long she would be writing to her sister, “Another stupid party last night; perhaps if larger they might be less intolerable, but here there were only just enough to make one card-table, with six people to look on and talk nonsense to each other.”
For what else was there to talk about in Bath, beyond the minutiae, the “nonsense,” of a resort town, where no one was doing much except going to the spa by day and each other’s parties in the evening? There was no farming, and no politics, since daily life, real life, had been left behind, “back home,” wherever that might have been. Here there were no serious households being run, so no cheese or beer or ongoing charity, and few babies, since those who alighted in Bath were mostly too young or too old. And since the town was constructed anyway on a new model, with the rich neighborhoods isolated from the poorer ones, there was little chance for snatches of conversation with people from the other side of life, where much of the fun of the world is to be found.
But Bath—you might call it the proto-gated-community effect—was deadly in its social fragmentation, and Jane Austen was bored. The public squares were too far away to attract the public, the open assemblies were losing ground to private parties, and there wasn’t even any hunting, so not even the passionate arguments about horses and dogs that she at least could laugh at in her stories. In fact, the only ones in Bath talking about horses were the careless young gamblers who’d come down looking for a nice rich bride to pay their stable bills. Which is to say, not Jane Austen.
Though there were plenty of other candidates for these young men—that was the other problem with Bath. It served as a sort of marriage marketplace of the last resort, particularly for young ladies on the high end of the age curve. Which was precisely where Jane Austen was mortified to find herself, at almost twenty-five, in 1800, and she had an uncomfortable suspicion that this was one of the reasons her parents had fixed on the place. Maybe they were thinking there was hope for her yet; that they would still find her someone. It was what her grandparents had done with their own daughter, her mother, who had also found herself getting on—she was twenty-three—when they’d brought her to Bath; and then, voilà. There had been Mr. Austen, himself age thirty-three and just at the precise point in his life where he was both prepared to take a wife and disabused of any dreams of an heiress, and they were married right there in Bath, at the lovely church.
So why not poor Jane? She was still nice and slim, with cheeks still pink, and those sparkling clear eyes that all her nieces and nephews were to mention in later years. And in truth there seemed to be no one for her in the country. Her news of the dances there had been, increasingly, no news, or even bad news, which she turned, Jane Austen–style, into good reading. For example, “There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me, but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about.”
Anyway, there seemed to be “a scarcity of men,” she would write that year, the eighth year of war on the Continent, “in general & a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much.” And as the move to Bath was set anyway, she indulged in a rare bit of optimism, speculating that, perhaps, “We have lived long enough in this Neighbourhood, the Basingstoke Balls are certainly on the decline, there is something interesting in the bustle of going away.”
And perhaps there would be someone in Bath for her. She had a new dress made—“a round gown, with a jacket, like Catherine Bigg’s, to open at the side”—and went on to her sister for some paragraphs, about fronts “sloped round to the bosom,” and “a frill . . . to put on occasionally when all one’s handkerchiefs are dirt—and low in the back,” even including a little sketch, to convey the full effect.
All this with the faith, the renewal, the new hopes, that stir to life in all bosoms “sloped round” by a new dress. And, thus attired, she went out to the balls of Bath.
She wasn’t old yet, she was still twenty-four. And it wasn’t as if she went without partners there—she had her partners in Bath, men who asked her to dance, old men, married men, Bath-types. “Toughs,” she would come to call them, chillingly, once she knew them a little better. And though she was an avid dancer at the country balls among people she knew, though she loved dancing with a passion, “could just as well dance for a week together as for half an hour,” as she’d written when she was twenty, she found the dances at Bath “very stupid,” with “nobody worth dancing with and nobody worth talking to.” She would later have her heroine in Northanger Abbey enter and leave the balls in Bath “without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient.”
Jane Austen would fix that for her.
But who would fix it for Jane Austen? Her friends had sustained her at home in Hampshire, but they didn’t seem to have “freindship,” as she often misspelled it, in Bath. What they had was acquaintanceship, fine for the beautiful, rich, and married, but to an unmarried, not quite young, and close to poor woman, this
was a form of pure ordeal. Jane Austen had been sheltered from this kind of thing at home, where everyone knew her. There were no strange eyes on her there, no offhand or harsh summings-up.
But in Bath, there were new drawing rooms to walk into, new faces, hard and white, to take her measure. She soon knew the drill. There would be the introduction, and then the quick appraisal. She was no one—though from a good enough family, and therefore suitable for an extra at table, or to stand among them at one of their dances. Someone who could be asked, but would not, on the other hand, be missed if she regretted.
All this every time she entered a drawing room in Bath.
That first spring she was still hoping, still thinking, that disguised among this crew there might be a possible friend. There was a Mrs. Chamberlayne, with whom she went out walking, several times, in May of 1801. The first time, the woman walked so briskly that Jane Austen was impressed, and thought perhaps there might be something interesting in her athleticism.
“It would have amused you to see our progress,” she wrote to her sister. “We went up by Sion Hill, and returned across the fields. In climbing a hill Mrs. Chamberlayne is very capital; I could with difficulty keep pace with her, yet would not flinch for the world. On plain ground I was quite her equal. And so we posted away under a fine hot sun, she without any parasol or any shade to her hat, stopping for nothing, and crossing the churchyard at Weston with as much expedition as if we were afraid of being buried alive. After seeing what she is equal to, I cannot help feeling a regard for her.”
But that proved chimerical—for the next time they walked together, Jane Austen was bored. It “was very beautiful,” she wrote, “as my companion agreed, whenever I made the observation.” This is Austen-ese, spoken only between the sisters, for “the woman had nothing whatever to say for herself.”
Her letter continued: “And so ends our friendship, for the Chamberlaynes leave Bath in a day or two.”
Which was just as well. “I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable; I respect Mrs. Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment. Miss Langley is like any other short girl, with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable dress and exposed bosom. Adm. Stanhope is a gentleman-like man, but then his legs are too short and his tail too long.”
Austen-ese for, I am in despair.
Not that it did her any good to hate it there. Her parents were doing quite well in the place. If Jane wasn’t finding a husband, well, that was what it was. “Poor Jane,” but the waters were helping her father’s gout. He bought a new cane, easy to come by in Bath. He didn’t mind the “toughs,” nor did he find their parties “stupid,” since he never minded sitting down among them for a hand of cards.
“Intolerable,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister, but a game of whist was just as pleasant to the retired Reverend George Austen at Bath as it had been at home in Hampshire.
III.
And so it went, for the next two years. The Big Clock struck twenty-five, then twenty-six, was rounding on twenty-seven. Jane Austen was at the outer limit, as even she saw it, of marriageability. When she pulled up in a borrowed coach at Manydown that day, all she had in the way of money was an allowance from her parents—worth about $1,000 per year—but not an income.
Nor was there any way—outside of marriage—for her, or any respectable woman of the gentry class with living male relatives, to get an income. The two options open to gentlewomen of that day were teaching or becoming a governess, but both offered lives bleak and downtrodden, a “sacrifice,” as Jane Austen would call it in Emma, “a retirement from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.”
Less careers than hard judgments, on one’s family as well, exposed as incapable of supporting an unmarried sister, and so naturally shunned by anyone with elsewhere to turn. Both governesses and teachers were subject to offhand scorn by those they served—“served” being the operative word. They were servants—smart servants, fallen servants, poor gentlewomen servants who had had the worst luck of all, true, but servants, and if they were so smart, why weren’t they rich or at least married? Was it the length of the nose, or perhaps the pallor of the cheeks, “a bit too full,” their vapid, silk-clad, bejeweled employers could almost be seen wondering.
Not that they ever asked. Nary a question beyond the references, which these impoverished gentlewomen always had, stellar references, from the vicar, from the bishop, even, because their grandfather had once been rich and had endowed the parish—but that was history, and who cared for history? Outside the schoolroom, that is, from where these ever thinner, ever paler, always shabbier—didn’t they care?—shades rarely strayed, except for the obligatory dinners, Christmas, the family birthdays, when they shook out the one good dress—again?—and took their seat at the far end of the table.
“Dear old Sharpe” or “Fairfax” or “Eyre,” but not Austen, not yet, her father was still alive, and though by no means rich, he could still support her on his retirement stipend. He loved her, respected her even, enjoyed her stories, and would keep her from the governess trade.
But he was her father, not her husband, and he was old. And he had moved her against her will out of what she had thought of till then as her home—but it turned out that it wasn’t her home. It was his home, and when he decided to leave, they left. So though it could have been worse for her, much worse, though she was neither a teacher in a school nor a governess to the stupid rich, she was still a single woman with no way to make any money beyond hoping for it, as she and Cassandra often did in their letters—“I do not know where we are to get our Legacy—but we will keep a sharp look-out”—and with no home at all at this point.
. . .
What she had, though, were her friends from Hampshire. There were five of them who mattered to her, five women whom she probably couldn’t even remember having met, since she had known them all her life. This was what friendship was to Jane Austen—deep and lifelong, friendship with women with links not just to her but to her entire family. And three of the five lived at Manydown.
They were the Bigg sisters, Catherine, Alethea, and a widowed sister, Elizabeth, who had invited the Austen sisters to spend a few nice long leisurely weeks with them, as people did then. The Bigg house, Manydown, was a lovely old place with plenty of room for all, and plenty of people employed there to make it all easy, set in a lovely old park, in Hampshire, Jane Austen’s favorite part of England, a short ride from what she still called “home.” It was winter, and she arrived hoping for “a hard black frost,” which would make the crisp fast walks she loved possible, with no mud, no puddles, and then, after that, true comfort. “To sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room is a luxurious sensation,” she’d written earlier, and to sit thus, in that kind of comfort, and with friends, real friends, must have seemed to her, after Bath, like she’d fought her way in from the blizzard.
And then there would be the dinners, delightful, small, with no low end of the table, stretching into long pleasant evenings, since there was, unlike at Bath, nowhere to rush off to. The moment itself could be the thing. And the Biggs knew her, they loved her, there was no judging, only deepening conversation, among the women and also their father, Lovelace Bigg, a widower, who lived there with them, and whom she liked so much. He was jolly, one of those Hampshire dog-and-horse men, that cozy old type she’d come to miss in Bath. An old-time lord of the manor, devoted to his place and his people—family, staff, and tenants—with “a character so respectable and worthy,” as Jane Austen had once written to her sister, leading a life so rooted, so free of the self, so big, in stark contrast to the petty pursuits of health and pleasure that had emptied her hours since her family had left home.
A “life so useful,” she called it, the kind of life she herself aspired to, considered worthiest, worth living. A life with both substance and leisure—which for her had meant, when she still lived at ho
me at Steventon, active help for the poor with both money and food and warm handmade clothing, and time in the afternoon to sit and write. Both of which had been taken from her by the uprooting to Bath. Both of which flooded over her once again as she arrived at Manydown.
“We spend our time here quietly as usual,” she wrote. “One long morning visit is what generally occurs.” She herself was described by one of the sisters, Alethea, as “pleasant, cheerful, interested in everything about her.” Happy, that is. Even if just on reprieve, just for the moment. Even if Manydown was just a port in the storm that was now her life.
They made seven at dinner, an agreeable number, enough but not too many. Still, with seven, someone always had something new to bring to the table—an observation from a walk, some news from town, and when that failed, Napoleon, and Pitt, and the terrible Mr. Fox. There was just the right degree of disagreement on the small things to keep it all lively, although the seventh member, the younger brother, Harris, sat mostly in silence, because of his stutter—and his father. His stutter, his father—and where one began and the other left off, no one knew, but in those days, overbearing fathers and stuttering sons were taken more in stride. Just one of the permutations of extended families living together in elaborate, multigenerational houses.
Jane Austen certainly didn’t think anything of it, either way. She’d known Harris for most of his life—had even taught him to dance, years ago, when she’d come to a ball at Manydown, unforgettable, since they’d illuminated the greenhouses. This at a time when light in the night still took one’s breath away—it was so rare and expensive.
That was in 1796, when Jane Austen was twenty, and caught in that brief whirl with her Irish friend—you could say boyfriend—Tom Lefroy. When life itself had seemed a merry dance to her, and one she danced well. And since she danced so well, with grace and real lightness, never tiring or walking through the long numbers, none of the heaviness you saw in some of the other girls, the richer girls, should she have denied herself all expectations from the start? Was she so wrong to have thought that there might have come something for her from it all?