by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
“6: presents.” $400. Mostly for her nieces and nephews.
“3.10—charity.” $200.
“2.13—rent a piano.” $145.
“1 on plays and waterparties.” $65. For her two nephews whose mother had just died. She took them boating on the river in Southampton.
True, if she hadn’t taken the boys boating, and had cut out the rest of the presents and all that charity, she could have mustered the £10.
But, despite being “sunk in poverty,” that never crossed her mind. The Austens gave charity, she had always given charity, and if she stopped giving, then who was she? Someone she wouldn’t know.
And what would she do with the manuscript anyway, if she did get it back? That was the worst part—Crosby was the only one who’d ever accepted any of her work. Suppose she did buy it back—where would she turn with it? What else could she do?
Nothing—that was the thing, nothing. That was her life—nothing, or almost. All she could control were the few presents for others, a little piano music to cheer her in the morning, a gift of alms to the poor. The only writing she could manage in these dark wandering years were the letters to her sister, some of them—more of them—on the cross side.
After sneering at a rich aunt’s health complaints—“What can vex her materially?”—and insisting her sister-in-law’s widowed brother, seeking another wife, had “no right to look higher than his daughter’s Governess,” she turned her writer’s eye, and relentless humor, on herself, admitting that “I am forced to be abusive for want of subject, having really nothing to say. I expect a severe March, a wet April, & a sharp May.”
“You could not shock her more than she shocks me,” wrote W. H. Auden. “I would rather not find myself alone in the room with her,” wrote Virginia Woolf. D. H. Lawrence calls her “mean,” and “old maidish.” Harold Nicolson sees a mind “like a very small, sharp pair of scissors.” E. M. Forster hears the “whinnying of harpies.”
But what were they smoking? Jane Austen was, true, in her way, “abusive” in these letters to a wholly sympathetic and confidential confidante; but these were years of exile, when she couldn’t sit to write her books, maybe would never sit to write again, and what was life then?
What was life? Without that half smile that played around her face as she sat, writing at her own little desk in her corner? Without those “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” as her starting point, families she knew, Hampshire families rooted in her own Hampshire ground, with those subtle distinctions that make all the difference, as with those gnarled vines that produce magical wine in their own terroirs in Burgundy or Bordeaux, and don’t do anything special anywhere else.
Hampshire, home—Jane Austen’s terroir, from which had sprung that precise variety of human comedy that connected her, a woman alone, to the world, and not just any world, but the world she loved, and connected her, too, to Johnson and Richardson, Fielding and Wollstonecraft, all of them somehow there, in her bedroom as she wrote.
But away from Hampshire, nothing took root. Nothing seemed quite right, or made sense.
She was lost, unhappy, dependent, an exile, and, worst of all, confused. Overcome with “languor,” as she put it, writing unhappily from her rich brother’s house. “When are calculations ever right?” she cried, in ink, to her sister. “Nobody ever feels or acts, suffers or enjoys, as one expects.”
Does Forster hear his “whinnying of harpies” here? He is mistaken, then, they are all mistaken, though she would have preferred their dislike to their pity. Would have been glad that no one saw a terrified, brilliant woman for whom everything, somehow, had gone wrong. A woman who believed in love—“Nothing can compare to the misery of being bound without love,” she wrote to a niece. Her best characters disdained pursuing “a Man merely for the sake of situation.” They considered it “wretched . . . unpardonable, hopeless and wicked” to “marry without affection.” Which seemed fine on the page, but when carried into real life?
Well, there was Jane Austen nearly thirty-three. Unmarried. Childless. Alone. Homeless. Worse, open to those fraught, precarious charges—“harpies”; “old maidish”; “mean.” They’d burned women at Exeter a mere hundred and thirty years before.
Though her brothers would protect her.
Unless it was between her and one of the brothers’ wives? Then what? But she knew what. Because wives came first, and children, of course, naturally. And she only after. She knew that even in her dreams—bad dreams. The kind where the dog at the party bites only you.
But that’s how it was with unmarried women. “Always in the way, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody,” she’d joked to her sister a few years before, about an old woman in Bath. But that was when she was in her twenties, and now, in her thirties—with nothing to her name, and nothing to hope for, nothing to show for her bold rejection of wealth and protection and a splendid home of her own where she would be first not last, and in the way of no one, neither harpy nor old maid but rather mistress of all she surveyed and any dog at the party wouldn’t bite her, but would be hers—now the joke seemed very much on her.
V.
But that wasn’t how it ended.
True, she never married, there would be no fatherly husband, the kind she came to like best, a Mr. Knightley or Colonel Brandon, for her.
But it turned out she didn’t need one, because one fine day in 1808, Jane Austen and her mother and sister were offered a house. Not just a house, but a wonderful house, called Chawton Cottage, with six bedrooms, a garden, and in Hampshire, no less, so not just a house, but a home. In the land she loved, the hills she could “explain,” only about fifteen miles from Steventon, where she’d grown up. It had come to her rich brother from his benefactor, and now it occurred to him that it might serve for his mother and sisters, and then, just like that, their exile was over.
Jane Austen was almost giddy with joy. She wrote, of the house, to another of her brothers:
. . . how much we find
already in it to our mind;
And how convinced, that when all complete
It will all other Houses beat,
That ever have been made or mended,
With rooms concise, or rooms distended.
And, “Yes, yes,” she wrote to her sister, “we will have a pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for 30 guineas, and I will practice country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews and nieces.”
Nephews and nieces whom she loved and was loved by. “Aunt Jane and I walk every day in the garden.” “Aunt Jane and I drove about shopping.” “Aunt Jane and I very snug.”
“The whinnying of harpies”? “Mean” Jane Austen? Or a single woman sheltered at last? In out of the “white glare” with its pitiless appraisals, sheltered enough to think once more of the pleasures of her own life, of playing her beloved country dances on her new pianoforte, and then, finally, and at last, that half-secret, most intense of all pleasures of which she was essentially deprived all these long silenced years—her work.
The Austen women moved into Chawton Cottage in the winter of 1809. They invited a close friend, Martha Lloyd, to join them, partly because that was how women lived in those days, and partly so Jane wouldn’t have to be alone with her mother when Cassandra was traveling. The logistics of having Martha while leaving guest rooms for those nieces and nephews meant that Jane and her sister would have to share a room, but they likely would have anyway. “They are wed,” their mother would, annoyingly, say. But they were wed, in a way—bound by sheer inclination even beyond the blood tie of being sisters. They truly liked each other, trusted and missed each other, shared tastes, opinions, and a private laugh at the world. Put into words by Jane.
There was no dressing room off the bedroom at Chawton for a desk, but it was a house of women, and quiet enough that Jane Austen found she could write downstairs and be mostly unbothered. Unbothered enough so that the first year at Chawton, she sat and revised “Elinor and Marianne” into S
ense and Sensibility. Her brother Henry, living in London and mixing with a fashionable set, got it sold and published for her, and the small edition sold out. That was in 1811.
Meanwhile, she was “lopping and chopping,” as she put it, “First Impressions” into Pride and Prejudice. This was published in 1813.
Suddenly life was less bleak; life was, one might even say, beautiful. All the doubts, all the slights, subtle or less so, had been transmuted into art, and turned out to be just what she needed, what she drew on, to preserve her light touch from superficiality. The depths under her thin black ice.
Even her unmarried state, her childlessness—true, there were no little replicas of her own clear hazel eyes, her pink cheeks, “too full.” But had she married—let’s say Harris Bigg-Wither, to whom she’d said yes that strange night eleven years before—would she have been our Jane Austen? Harris himself did marry a few years later; went on, in fact, to father ten children, five girls and five boys. Would Jane Austen Bigg-Wither, in the throes of perpetual pregnancy, have found a moment to turn “First Impressions” into Pride and Prejudice? Would she have even survived all that childbirth? Many—very many—didn’t.
But she—she suddenly found that from being “least and last,” she somehow now had it all. Money of her own, and the exaltation that brings to one who has been so long dependent. It wasn’t even that it was much—she received for the four books published in her lifetime £684—but it was hers. She rushed out to buy beautiful material for gowns for herself and Cassandra. “Remember, I am very rich,” she joked to her sister. No more dowdy caps for them. Her new money had made her “less indifferent to Elegancies. I am still a Cat if I see a Mouse.”
“Old maidish”? Then bring on the old maids, and their children. “I have had my own darling child from London,” she exulted to Cassandra, Pride and Prejudice proofs in hand. She had even seen one of the characters, she teased, at an exhibit of paintings in London, a Romney portrait that seemed to her a perfect Jane Bennet, and “there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her.” Lizzie, on the other hand, would be “in yellow.”
There was no Lizzie to be found, though, not even among the late portraits by Sir J. Reynolds. “I can only imagine that [Darcy] prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling—that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy.”
Ha, ha. So what if D. H. Lawrence didn’t get it? She wasn’t the only one, by the way, thinking about Lizzie and Darcy, Marianne and Elinor. The Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, thought that she and Marianne were “very like in disposition, the same imprudence . . . I must say it interested me much.” Her father, the future George IV, insisted on sets of both books at each of his residences.
The books had, by the way, been published anonymously, as “by a Lady,” but her brothers were hard-pressed to keep the secret. Charles Austen, the naval commander, wrote that when he “praised [Sir Walter Scott’s best-seller] Waverley highly, a young man present observed that nothing had come out for years to be compared with Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. As I am sure you must be anxious to know the name of a person of so much taste, I shall tell you it is Fox, a nephew of the late Charles James Fox,” the great opposition leader in Parliament.
And who on board ship wouldn’t own all, as did Charles? But so did brother Henry, a banker in London, with less excuse but more temptation—when he heard his sister’s novels praised, he, too, spilled the beans and basked in her growing glory.
And though unwilling at first to be viewed as a “lady novelist,” “a wild Beast,” as she put it, she found herself beginning to take a breath on the whole thing, beginning to uncurl a bit in that sun. She even wrote to a niece of “the pleasures of vanity . . . at receiving the praise which every now and then comes to me, through some channel or other.”
She went to a dance and found herself in “the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago,” she wrote to her sister. “I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.”
Quite as happy—happier, even proud. She had chosen her work over what you might call “life”—marriage, children, security, riches—and how many do that? Especially women then—who had the guts? No one. Statistically no one.
What women do is to go on “trusting to love after marriage,” and it works, they learn to love their nice rich husbands whose features smile up from the crib by their sides. But she didn’t, she couldn’t, she trusted to something else, something bigger, and mostly that doesn’t work out. Mostly, in life, she would have lived and died quiet as a mouse, unnoticed, unknown, at the far end of the table, “last and least.”
But this time, the work, that spark she’d trusted, had caught fire, and lit her life. And she was happy, she found, “a Cat,” on her own terms, and even the weather was wonderful. November in England, but “I enjoy it all over me,” she wrote to her sister, “from top to toe, right to left, long, perpendicularly, diagonally.”
And there they all are, her own brave fighting girls, Lizzie and Marianne, Emma and Anne Elliot, and even Eliot’s future Maggie Tolliver and Brontë’s Cathy Earnshaw and on and on, all of them enjoying November, from top to toe with Jane Austen.
VI.
One might wish to see a map of Jane Austen’s stars from 1809 through 1816. Posthumous offense has been taken for her plight at having to write in the living room, on paper small enough to be covered by a blotter upon intrusion. But how many among us, with paneled private studies and nice windows and doors that lock, write like she did in that common room in Chawton?
For here is the list:
JULY 7, 1809: moves to Chawton Cottage. Begins rewrite of Sense and Sensibility.
OCTOBER 1811:3, by “a Lady,” is published. She starts her rewrite of 3.
JANUARY 1813:3 is published. She starts writing 3.
MAY 1814:3 is published. She begins work on 3.
DECEMBER 1815: Emma is published.
In 1816, she starts work on “The Elliots.” Puts it down, picks it up again, rewrites the last two chapters, and finishes Persuasion, as we know it, on August 6, 1816.
Room of her own or not, Jane Austen knew what she’d been born for, that shining time at Chawton. She had been born to write, she’d laughed at the world to write, she’d turned down a brilliant marriage to write, she’d sat alone and low at the sorry end of every dinner table at every dinner she was obliged to attend to write, she’d scrimped and saved and raged and hurt, badly, under insult to write, and write she did. Write she had, as no one had before her. Of a world that was hers to know and to reveal, as exotic and interesting in its way, if you knew it as she did, as Marco Polo’s China.
And write successfully, too—because it turns out there is that in her story. The first edition of Sense and Sensibility sold out. Pride and Prejudice was an immediate success and went into a second edition. Mansfield Park sold out in six months, and Emma was dedicated, by royal request, to the Prince Regent. With that book, she moved to John Murray, the best publisher in London.
Who published Persuasion, and would also take, she hoped, the next one, already in the works, that she was calling “The Brothers.” It had swum into sight, and was starting to take watery form at her table—when she could sit at her table, without her eyes hurting, or, for some strange reason, her face. She had always hated illness, disdained complaint, but there had come upon her, she had to admit, a weakness where there had been none. And she, who had always enjoyed a walk in the evening, found suddenly, in the summer of 1816, that she couldn’t bear the night air on her face.
And when that ameliorated somewhat, she found herself too weak for her afternoon walks. Nor had she much appetite for her dinner, or even the will to sit at her desk. Her nieces would find the avid write
r stretched awkwardly across three chairs in the living room—never on the sofa. That she left for her mother, the sick one, the complainer, who would outlive her by a full ten years.
But Jane Austen wasn’t sick, not really, she argued. She had simply appeared “ill at the time of your going,” she wrote to her sister in September of 1816, due to the “very circumstance of your going.” It was all nothing but “agitation, fatigue,” and she was quite well again and “nursing myself up now into as beautiful a state as I can, because I hear that Dr. White means to call on me before he leaves the country.” Well again meaning well enough for a small joke, though there is the stark fact that the doctor was himself worried enough to come back.
As well he might have been, for this turned out to be the last letter between the sisters.
“I have certainly gained strength through the winter,” Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny in March of 1817. “Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.” She was able to work on “The Brothers,” and had finished the first twelve chapters by the middle of March.
But then she found herself sick again. “Bile,” she wrote to a friend, “rheumatism,” but by this time she could hardly walk. Addison’s disease, say most doctors now, or Hodgkin’s disease. Bovine tuberculosis. Brill-Zinsser.
All curable now, none curable then. By mid-April, she was pretty much in bed, pale, an invalid. On April 27, she made her will (leaving almost everything to her sister), but a doctor from nearby Winchester held out hope for a cure. Her sister and brother Henry took her there in the pouring rain toward the end of May. They rented an apartment, and thought the treatment was working. On May 27, she joked to a nephew that “Mr Lydford says he will cure me & if he fails I shall draw up a Memorial & lay it before the Dean and Chapter & have no doubt of redress from that Pious, Learned & Disinterested Body.”