by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
Nearly seven years ago. He, Harris, had been little over fourteen then, and terribly shy, since he wasn’t sent to school, but educated at home by tutors, to spare him the teasing, what with the stutter. Still, they were old friends, she and he, or at least she was his sisters’ old friend, so no one for the backward boy to worry about, no one to judge or be judged by. And she’d taught him both the spirited country dances and the formal minuet, so at least he could join in with the others. Most often with his sisters as partners, or sometimes Jane herself. She would eventually write the scene, by the way, in her unfinished “The Watsons,” except that the little boy there was adorable, charming.
But as for Harris, though he had little “beside his height” to recommend him, as one of her nieces would write, he was twenty-one in 1802, and since his older brother had died, heir to Manydown. He had even taken his rightful place, despite the stutter, at Oxford, though had not finished his degree.
But the only ones who needed degrees in those days were the clergy, and Harris wasn’t going to be a clergyman, he was going to hire a clergyman, like Jane Austen’s father or brother. Give the man a good living, as a proper lord of the manor would do. Which was to be Harris’s lot, his luck, in life. To be lord of the stately splendid Manydown when his father died, and live as pleasant a life as could be had in England, and maybe the world, in those days.
And to live it in as pleasant a place as could be imagined. Manydown was a stone mansion, built around a courtyard, not just grand but also graced with history. The family had held the house for more than a hundred years before the first Queen Elizabeth, with one wing dating from Tudor times. They are mentioned in the Domesday Book, and an ancestor had bought a piece of their land from Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare’s patron.
And the house had been modernized, too, with its famous ironwork staircase and grand reception room on the first floor. Jane Austen loved the place, loved the combination of old and new, real grandeur, not opulence but beauty, and she loved the park surrounding it as well, the two hundred acres of ancient oaks and the famous cedar—with another 1,500 acres of farmland beyond, all of which made for wonderful walks and views. She had spent many a day and night there, first as a girl after the dances at nearby Basingstoke, and now as the unmarried—was it too soon to say spinster?—friend of Harris Bigg-Wither’s unmarried sisters.
She might have written an account of the night—we don’t know. All the letters she wrote from around that time were burned by her sister, Cassandra. But Cassandra was there, and told their nieces, afterward, how it had all played out.
It seems that Harris’s sisters knew what he was intending, and they let Cassandra in on the plot, and together the four women contrived to leave Jane Austen alone with the young man. This was on their second night there, just before supper. Somewhere in that grand vast house, Harris Bigg-Wither cornered Jane Austen and asked her to marry him.
She was taken completely by surprise. She saw her life, in that moment, flip from black to white. Everything became, all at once, its opposite. She was poor; she would be rich. She was last at the table; she would be first. She had no home; she would have the grandest home of all. Her carriage would be the best one. She would never have to think of that again.
Never have to think about any of it—she would no longer be one of “the girls.” No more “poor Jane.” That would be over, just like that. All in one stroke—lucky Jane, happy Jane, perhaps even eventually Lady Jane. She would return to Hampshire—they would all return to Hampshire. Thanks to dear happy married Jane, her sister, her mother and father, even, would have a home, and what a home. A home with their good friends, for they would all continue to live together. Harris’s sisters, his charming father, Jane and Cassandra, her parents when they were not in Bath—all of them. They would be her guests, for she would be the mistress of the house.
And the estate—mistress, too, that meant, to all the workers, the laborers. And a charitable one, as she’d already proved herself, when it was a hardship. She always reserved between 5 and 10 percent of her own meager yearly allowance for the poor. Imagine what she could do with real money, how beloved she would be, what an object of gratitude. And not just from the poor—from her brothers as well, for their careers in the navy were always needing a connection to move them up the ladder. Now, rather than needing a hand, she would be able to extend one.
And she would have children of her own too, not just nieces and nephews. She would not just marry, but make a brilliant match. Unheard-of, at her age, and in her situation—a woman of no money and no consequence, well on her way to being an old maid, already treated like an old maid, raising no eyes when she entered a room, causing not a ripple in the social current, unnoticed, unconsulted, unmarried. “Poor Jane.”
And now, here was a chance that even a beautiful young girl in her social position could scarcely dream of. Besides, she knew Harris, he didn’t frighten her, he was younger, the younger brother of her good friends. There would be no dreadful family to confront, none of the petty jealousies and wranglings she would chronicle so minutely in her books.
Did his sisters know he was going to ask her? she asked him. Did her sister?
Yes, he told her. Knew and supported. All of them.
Then yes, she said.
That evening passed as in a dream. There were the whoops, the shouts, the congratulations to the happy couple! Tears of joy, genuine joy, from the sisters, hers and his. His father brought out a French claret, a rare luxury in those days of homemade orange wine and mead, and they toasted the two, Jane and Harris. Long may they live. Happy forever.
She floated through it all. She was amazed, stunned, could hardly believe any of it. She would be married—she! Herself, Jane Austen, married! Just as she’d thought when she was young—not to Jack Smith of “God knows where” but to Harris Bigg-Wither of Manydown. It was hard almost to fathom, so sudden, so unexpected. So radical a change of circumstances, well beyond even the happy endings that were starting to come from her pen. For all the good that pen sought to do, it had never yet attempted such an out-of-the-blue, high-and-wild a leap as this one.
She floated up to bed. Her sister kissed her good night. They had shared a room all their lives, but here they had separate bedrooms. Maybe if Cassandra had slept with her that night, rubbed her temples, seen her to sleep—but she didn’t. All she did was kiss her and tell her how happy she was, how happy they all were, and then continue down the hall to her own room.
And Jane Austen closed the door.
Oh, God, if she’d only had someone in the room, to brush away the demons that must have come at her from every side. She knew that what Cassandra had said was true, that she was happy, that they were all happy. And how happy would be those who didn’t yet know, her own family, the ones who worried about her and, worse, faced the prospect of keeping her for the rest of her life. Here was her way out of that dreadful position, and more than that—her chance to turn the trick back on them, to become, like magic, at the stroke of twelve, their benefactor.
Eventually, she would put the very words that must have crossed her own family’s minds in the mouth of Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park, to the unhappy Fanny Price, as she turns down a rich suitor: “The advantage or disadvantage of your family, your parents, your brothers and sisters never seems to have held a moment’s share in your thoughts . . . throwing away such an opportunity to be settled in life, eligibly, honourably, nobly settled as will, probably, never occur to you again.”
She knew that. It would never occur to her again. As her niece Caroline would write many years later, “All worldly advantages would have been to her, and she was of an age to know this quite well. My aunts had very small fortunes, and on their father’s death, they and their mother would be, they were aware, but poorly off. I believe most young women so circumstanced would have gone on trusting to love after marriage.”
As did her own sweet Marianne, in Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen married her off to Colonel Br
andon, and we are happy about it—what other options were there for her? After the fiasco with Willoughby?
None, nor were there for Jane Austen, but who was there right then to marry her off to Harris Bigg-Wither? No one.
And in the still of that dark night, she found she couldn’t do it. Despite everything—just could not. In the dark of night, it was suddenly not them all but her, and not just her, but her and Harris, a big young man whom she did not love. Barely liked. Might have grown to love “after marriage,” but until then? What would she do in his bed? That became the toughest angel of all, in her wrestle that night: What would Jane Austen, the one who had sat alone in a room once, happy with her pen in hand, do in that young man’s bed?
She was dressed and packed and downstairs waiting by the door in the morning when the first of the household arose. She excused herself and begged forgiveness. She was in tears. She had to renege, take back her word, she could not marry Harris. She begged the sisters to bring round the carriage and take her off, right away, to her brother who lived closest, in her old house, in Steventon.
The household was shocked, offended. Her sister hastily gathered her things, and the two Austen women left in disgrace. The Bigg sisters accompanied them in the carriage. Her brother and his wife were likewise shocked to see them pull up, so soon after leaving, shocked to see the four women embracing each other in tears, and then turning away from each other. Shocked further when they heard the reason. Her brother’s wife, Mary, felt Jane had made an incomprehensible mistake, the mistake of her life. She could not refrain from voicing this.
And what answer was there for Jane Austen to give her, to give them all? None, no answer, since there wasn’t one, not yet. For the one and only time in her life, she insisted that her brother take her in his carriage, immediately, back to Bath. It was bad timing for him—a Saturday, he had his sermon to write, and then preach on Sunday. He would have to somehow wrangle a substitute at very short notice. If she could wait till Monday—
But she wouldn’t wait till Monday. For the only time on record, Jane Austen would not wait. She begged her brother to take her away from there, that day, right then. To his credit, he did.
IV.
After that it went from bad to worse. Jane Austen scholars call this part of her life “the silent years.” She was basically homeless, a guest here, lodgings there, for the next nine years. Nine years. Her father died in 1805, three years after she refused Harris Bigg-Wither, the pension stopped, and then she and her mother and sister became family charity cases. Her brothers—their wives—subscribed annual amounts for their upkeep. That, cobbled together with Mrs. Austen’s minimal stipends, amounted to about £460 a year for the three of them.
They were truly poor now, as well as beholden. When invited to their brothers’ establishments, they had no choice but to go. Jane Austen felt her situation most acutely when she was called to the richest of her brothers, at his grand estate. In “The Watsons,” she speaks of “the dreadful mortifications of unequal society.” She doesn’t even have the money to properly tip the servants there. “I cannot afford more than ten shillings for Sackree”—her sister-in-law’s maid—she frets to Cassandra. To her shame—there must be a name for this. Virginia Woolf, a century later, is mortified by the same phenomenon, the maids unpacking her shabby nightgown and old stockings, on a visit to a grand country house. That shame—irrational, unfair, laughable even, when faced with it, pen in hand, in one’s own room.
But, confronted in a sister-in law’s house, face-to-face with a sister-in-law’s maid—a rich sister-in-law, rich because her, Jane Austen’s, relatives had made her rich, had given Jane Austen’s brother their property and fortune without a thought of his sisters—hard to muster the humor there. Jane Austen and this sister-in-law in fact didn’t much like each other. Her heroine in “The Watsons” rails against “hardhearted prosperity, low-minded Conceit & wrong-headed folly.”
But Jane Austen didn’t rail. “Dinner is pleasant at the lower end of the Table,” she wrote gamely from her brother’s grand house to Cassandra, but she would come right out with it in Mansfield Park, creating the evil aunt to say it, straight, to Fanny Price: “Wherever you are, you must be lowest and last.”
Lowest and last. Not that she sought to be first among them, or among them at all. “They mostly discuss food. You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me,” she joked to Cassandra. Tried to joke. But finally she broke off. “I feel rather languid and solitary . . . I am sick of myself and my bad pen.”
Sick. She wanted to go home, but she didn’t have a home, she didn’t even have a ride. She couldn’t afford one. So there she sat, at the low end of the table, served by maids who would know her by her undersized tip, sipping the bitter broth of the poor relative, even when it was “French wine and ices,” until, like a child or the dependent she was, she was informed one fine morning that her visit was over, they were shipping her back. She had not been consulted. She was thirty. “Till I have a traveling purse of my own, I must submit to such things,” she wrote to Cassandra.
. . .
Jane Austen abandoned “The Watsons” around then. She’d had enough of “hardhearted prosperity” out in the world. She couldn’t face it in battle alone in the night, at a wobbly table in some insufficient rented room. One of her stuffy, Victorian nephews wrote after her death that the Watson characters were “too low” for their illustrious aunt. But were they? Why? Just because the older sister says out loud, “We must marry . . . it is very bad to grow old & be poor and laughed at.”
Jane Austen had solutions at hand for the Watson girls—had already marshaled the requisite suitors, and set them moving toward their transformative proposals. But one gets the sense that she somehow couldn’t pull it off this time. Had ceased, in those days, those long years, to believe, even in her own solutions.
Life was bleak, life was an unending struggle to make ends meet and maintain appearances. To lead a gentrified life with no money. She has her protagonist in “The Watsons” say to one of the stupid rich who inquires why she does not ride, “Female Economy will do a great deal my Lord but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.”
“Female Economy”—that was Jane Austen’s lot. Trying to turn “a small income into a large one.” It was exhausting, and there was that feeling, those years, of real futility. If one is sick of oneself and one’s “bad pen.”
After five long dreary years in Bath, though, she, along with her mother and sister, finally left, with “happy feelings of escape.” But what kind of escape was it, when all they were doing was moving to another coastal town, into a shared house with a recently married brother and his young wife? He had offered them rooms in the house he’d rented in Southampton. He was a naval officer and expecting to ship out before long, and thus it was thought that they’d make good company for his wife.
And they probably did—what choice did they have? But still, to have to charm, on a daily basis, a young married woman with no particular charm or culture of her own, but she their hostess, and they her guests? It was better, though, than Bath, and better, too, than the far end of the rich brother’s table. But no place to summon the high spirits requisite for serious writing. No place to confront a cast of newly impoverished young gentlewomen, needing to marry their way out of poverty.
Hard to go on, hard to believe. Hard to go on when one doesn’t believe. There had been one ray of light, real light, in all this—in 1803, a publisher in London, Benjamin Crosby, had bought her manuscript Northanger Abbey, then called Susan, for £10, which nearly doubled her income for that year. He promised “early publication,” and even advertised that the book was “in the press.”
And then, nothing.
Five years later, she wrote to him discreetly, under the name of Mrs. Ashton Dennis. She mentioned his promise of “an early publication” and protested, nicely, that this had not come to pass. She wondered if the manuscript was “by some carelessness to have been l
ost; & if that was the case, am willing to supply You with another Copy if you are disposed to avail Yourselves of it, & will engage for no farther delay when it comes into Your hands. . . . Should no notice be taken of this Address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work, by applying elsewhere.”
That was fine with Crosby, he responded by return mail. She could have her manuscript back for the same £10 he’d given her.
Ten pounds or a million—Jane Austen didn’t have it. We do have her account of how she spent her £50 allowance that year:
“14: Clothes.” That would be about $910 in today’s dollars. Fabric, dressmakers, hats, shoes. It is worth noting that in her time, there was no such thing as cheap clothes. A pair of silk stockings, for example, cost the equivalent of about $60, and there was no alternative. Nylon hadn’t been invented.
“8: laundry.” About $520. An interesting expense. Dyes were not color-fast then, and fabrics shrank at different rates. If you read the descriptions of how to wash a “good” dress in those days, the laundress started by removing the trimming and the buttons. Then she separated the lining from the garment itself (picking the seams). If the skirt was full enough that the weight of the wet fabric would cause it to stretch unevenly, she took the skirt off the bodice and took the gores apart at the seams. Then she washed it, dried it, checked to see if the lining and the garment still matched up in size, made any necessary adjustments, and sewed it all back together.
“4: postage.” About $260. One paid in those days upon receiving letters, in her case mostly from Cassandra. This was a significant expense, but as her protagonist says in Emma, “Oh! the blessing of a female correspondent when one is really interested in the absent!”