Midnight Read online

  TO MY Mother

  Who always vindicated the Rights of Woman,

  and like Joan of Arc’s mother, kept the faith

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Midnight and Jane Austen

  Mary Shelley on the Beach

  Joan of Arc in Chains

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  MIDNIGHT AND JANE AUSTEN

  I.

  Bleak midwinter, 1802; doubly bleak, as Jane Austen was now essentially homeless. She and her sister, Cassandra, had arrived at Manydown in the snow by borrowed carriage, from a grueling season, with their parents, as houseguests, tossed from relation to relation. Sometimes welcomed, sometimes tolerated, but even when welcomed, when explicitly invited, still seated at what she called “the lower end of the table” and expected to play cards into the night. To show interest in all, and expect none for herself—in other words, to play the part of unmarried woman without a penny to her name.

  Although if she’d had a penny, which in this case would have meant an income of at least £200 per year, a figure often mentioned in her novels as minimal for keeping up the lifestyle to which she’d been born, she probably wouldn’t have been unmarried to begin with. A state of affairs, by the way, that had come upon her both gradually and by surprise, because it wasn’t as if Jane Austen had thought herself marked out for spinsterhood. Though she was not a standout beauty, she was no worse than the lot of married ladies, had lively brown eyes, was funny and smart, loved to dance, could sew a fine seam, and came from a family as good as the rest. Her favorite book was Tom Jones—which seemed to form a backdrop, a sort of laughing, rollicking scenery for her first flirtation, with Tom Lefroy, a boy who was visiting her friends and neighbors, when she was twenty.

  He loved Tom Jones, too, she thought worth mentioning in a letter to Cassandra. Meaning that he was both a reader and a rollicker himself, so exactly the kind of man Jane Austen expected to marry.

  That she would marry she never doubted. As a teenager, she had tried out a few names in an old parish registry that her father, the parson in the local church, left lying around—inscribing her engagement first to a “Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London,” and then to an “Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool.” Gentlemen both, they sounded, along the lines of the Austens themselves. Not quite nobility, though capable of rising to it should the chance come, as it did for some of her brothers. As for her, she was prepared, clearly, to take her place in London or Liverpool society as either Mrs. Fitzwilliam or Mrs. Mortimer, although on another line she penned, “Jack and Jane Smith, late Austen,” followed by, “Of God knows where.” Already Jane Austen.

  She didn’t try out “Jane Lefroy,” because she was twenty by then. Moreover, as soon as it was noticed that the two of them were dancing together so much, and, when not dancing, sitting together in gales of laughter that evinced, even more dangerous, a meeting of the minds—engaging, in fact, in “everything most profligate in the way of dancing and sitting down together,” as she would write in the kind of teasing letter with which she would transmute bitterness all her life—the young man was sent away at once, before Christmas. This was partly to spare the feelings of the young Jane Austen, since there was no way that Tom Lefroy could marry her. She was too poor.

  And he, too, had no money, though what he did have were a mother and sister to support. He needed an heiress, and he got one, and went on to become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and lived to say that he’d liked Jane Austen very much, perhaps even half loved her, “with a boyish love.” But marry her, no, he couldn’t—none of them could. She wasn’t pretty enough for a man to lose his head over, and she didn’t bring enough of anything else to the table.

  No title for a rich man, no money for a poor one. Her sister had gotten engaged—it has been said that she was prettier. Maybe she was. We have a straight-on sketch of Jane Austen, but only a profile of her sister Cassandra. The only description we have is from some nieces, who laughed at them, the two “girls,” as the family called them, in their matching caps. Quite dismissive, with no understanding of what it meant to be wearing matching caps. That two caps had to be cut from the one piece of cloth that could be afforded.

  Or even what it meant to wear a cap at all—that one had no ladies’ maid to fix one’s hair. That one had to resort instead to the expedient of pulling on a cap. That one was an old maid.

  Though before Cassandra Austen was an old maid, she was a fiancée, engaged to a lovely young man, who also had no money but had secured a “living,” as they say in the books of the day, as a country parson. This meant he was attached for life to a village church, chosen and supported by the local nobleman, and given what looks to us today like a very nice house. The problem being that the smaller churches offered salaries too small for a man with a family, so that a parson with a wife had to scrabble together two or three of these “livings,” which was precisely what Cassandra Austen’s parson was in the process of doing.

  And though no one could have called the match a “triumph,” still everyone was pleased, and at that point Cassandra had the prospect of a home of her own, much like the one her clergyman father had provided for them growing up, and, if God willed, a happy family. Cheerful if slightly improvident, with lots of rosy-cheeked children and a maid or two to milk the cow and make the beer. A carriage, eventually, if things progressed as they often did.

  Which looked to be the case, since the nobleman who supported the fiancé’s living then invited him to come along as ship’s chaplain while he went out to the West Indies to suppress a slave rebellion. This boded well for the young man’s future, and the Austens took it as a very good sign.

  The problem being that there was yellow fever in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, and he caught it and died. Cassandra Austen got the news months later, by tattered letter. The nobleman who took him out there was sorry. He hadn’t known the young man was engaged to be married; if he had, he never would have asked him to come on such a risky mission, he wrote.

  Which was probably true, but on the other hand, that was it for Cassandra Austen. She put on mourning clothes, and her cap, and set about waiting to die. Nursing this friend through childbirth, that one through illness, caring for the children, and the old ones—refusing to consider the several other suitors who tentatively raised their heads. Maybe she nurtured hopes of reuniting with her young man in heaven.

  But at least in this life she had had her invitation. Someone had at least asked her. Though she hadn’t in the end married, she had not walked the long and lonely road entirely alone.

  But Jane—“Not at all pretty,” an older cousin dismissed her. A neighbor remembered a girl “slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full” for her face. Her best feature seems to have been her “fine eyes,” not unlike her own Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, who is also a young woman of more wit than beauty, also without a fortune. But Lizzy Bennet had Jane Austen to write her a Mr. Darcy, a fabulously rich nobleman who could see beyond the social strictures of his day and was smart enough to prefer the bold, lively intelligence of a girl with no money to a dull little life with a garden-variety heiress. A man who was willing to look twice, willing to look hard enough to see beyond the obstacles that blocked Lizzy Bennet’s way—her family, his aunts, and all the ladies in the county with their eligible daughters and nieces—to the real and lasting light in her eyes.

  Jane Austen, however, had no one pulling those strings for her, and even though she was the smartest girl in the room, always, and the funniest, and daring, willing to dance all night, and surely the one who would have, given the
chance, climbed the fence on an outing, like the bold, ambiguous Mary Crawford in her Mansfield Park, in utter disdain for the creeping Victorian morality, she never had the chance. No one ever invited her to walk across the downs with him. No one looked across the room and really saw her. No one even turned his head, intrigued, at anything she said.

  Not that there really ever was anyone smart enough for that in her circle. She grew up in Hampshire, which was great fun when she was a girl, what with all the hunting and riding and country dances, but where the men were either prigs or talked, as she would write, “nothing but horses.” Which would provide us with some very good laughs in her books.

  But what did it do for her? As the years went on, it was as if she had wandered into one of those circular mazes in a truly bad dream. If there’d been someone who’d wanted her when she was young—if one of those handsome horse-talkers in a brightly colored jacket, the kind she liked, and the deep yellow breeches she fell in love with in Tom Jones, if someone like that had tried to kiss her one night after one of the dances, and then come by the next morning, when the blood from their hearts was still clouding their minds, then she might have—would have—married him, and become one of the minor characters in her own novels, the smart, kind women with too many children who are there mostly to help her heroines.

  But there were no kisses, not even with young Lefroy that time, or at least none that was written up with that killing humor. That humor that could kill or bite or sting anyone who might harm her or her sister, and as there was no one to stop her, no hand seeking hers, pulling her back, ever further into that crystalline maze of the seer she was left to wander.

  Where everything, everyone, is magnified, with no mercy, and where, though somehow invisible herself, she could see them all, ever more clearly, in that “bright white glare,” as she would call it. And where she found herself increasingly alone.

  II.

  By the time she and her sister pulled up to Manydown that winter day, she was nearly twenty-seven, the age at which Anne Elliot finally married for love in Persuasion, and poor Charlotte Lucas resigned herself to Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. But outside of the great Jane Austen novels, twenty-seven in 1802 was beyond the pale. Women didn’t marry at twenty-seven, they died at twenty-seven, of serial childbirth, for the most part. Since they married at seventeen.

  It had been a bad season for Jane Austen, a long, bad season. Her parents had decided to leave the house where she’d been born and grown up, her home, and go, essentially, on the road. Her father, the rector of the church at Steventon, still held his position and was entitled to the house—and the income that went with it—but his son James, Jane Austen’s older brother, was also a clergyman with a wife and growing family to support. The Austen parents resolved to relinquish the house and income to the son, and retire to the resort town of Bath, the Palm Beach or Palm Springs of their day—pick the place you’d rather live less. That’s how it was for Jane Austen.

  There had been no discussion, no consultation. One account claims that she came home from a visit with her friend Martha and was greeted by her mother, “Well, girls, it is decided.” All accounts agree that she fainted dead away when she heard.

  And it wasn’t just that she hated the thought of shallow, boring Bath; there was also the fact that she loved her home, loved the surrounding nature, the countryside there. Loved the trees, the elms and beeches, and her flower garden—she mentions wanting to plant syringa, “iv’ry pure,” as in one of the Cowper poems that her father used to read them of an evening, from the books she was informed they would also be leaving behind for her brother and his wife. Not to mention the walks, the hills she knew so well she could “explain” them, as she once put it.

  Since, one may imagine, she’d had lately to turn to them for rather more than in her younger days. When she had walked those hills with all the hopes of any perfectly nice-looking girl, mulling over the mystery of her own likely marriage, her still-undisclosed Mr. Mortimer or Jack Smith, or even dreaming of some wildly improbable meeting, as must have happened now and again, as it did in Sense and Sensibility, when a Willoughby appeared out of the blue to take a Marianne in his strong young arms.

  But by the time the Austens decamped from the region, Jane Austen would no longer have been walking in quite that same expectation. And as the years rolled by—she was twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—what she sought in and took from those hills must have been, increasingly, consolation.

  And inspiration, too, which she would carry back to the room in the house where she’d always lived, the room she shared in perfect sympathy with her sister, who anyway traveled quite a lot, and even when there, left Jane Austen in the requisite security from intrusion once she had sat at her desk with pen and paper. This, along with the quiet rhythm of country life, allowed her to cultivate what Picasso would call “seclusion,” so crucial to any artist, so precious to any woman.

  And what had come to her of the last few years of her seclusion in that room with its desk, the quiet brown carpet, her own dear piano, and the little oval mirror between the windows that looked out on the elms she so loved, seemed some compensation, even justification, for what had not. For what she had now were three manuscripts—“Elinor and Marianne,” “First Impressions,” and “Susan,” the future Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, respectively.

  They told stories that she thought had not been told in quite that way till then, about real people, the ones she knew well—“3 or 4 Families in a Country Village,” as she would put it to a niece some years later. Seen with the hyper-clarity that only the lonely can muster, the one who has been left to take measure of both the charm of those country families and the narrowing of their eyes. Who goes to their dinners though she will be seated well away from any honor, far from the host. Whose name still remains unadorned by Mr. Fitzwilliam’s or even Mr. Smith’s, and who expects, with increasing certainty, that she will leave their dances as she came to them, alone.

  Her own fate, then, she was having to conclude, and not what she’d imagined for herself, or would have chosen. But on the other hand, there seemed to come with it an awareness—was it a gift? She had written a few little books and stories when she was younger, half as spoofs, romps, taking off from the family theatricals that had enlivened the Austen household—but what she’d been doing lately felt qualitatively different. These were serious books—the same people as before, though written not by a joking girl but a clear-sighted woman. Who was still laughing but in a more knowing way, at her dumb old rich, her sharp new rich, her would-be rich, whom she eventually drags off the scene, to our satisfaction, still clawing the parquet.

  And we laugh with her at them, though laugh less at her less rich, her disinherited girls, the ones trying in discreet desperation to maintain the gentle forms—renting a pianoforte when the piano is sold, sitting fine and tall on borrowed horseback when the carriage can no longer be maintained. The girls slipping down from the gentle perch to which they’d been born, through no fault of their own—a father’s death, a thwarted marriage; girls whose best prospect is suddenly entering the governess market, “the slave trade,” as one of them, Jane Fairfax, shudders in Emma; nice girls, smart girls, even pretty girls, slipping down past the luckier ones, the less smart, and less nice, even less pretty, but firm in their fortunes, who have nothing to offer beyond the occasional spiteful meddling.

  Unless Jane Austen stopped them, which was precisely what she could and did do in the solitude in her room at home. Here the wrongs of outside were righted, and the last laugh went to her girls. Her “own children,” she would call them privately to her sister, her “suckling” babes, but they were more, they were her ladies fair, and she was their knight in armor. They were coming to life right there at her nice old desk, at the end of her sharpened plume pen, where she sat with them, day in, day out, without, again, much fear of interruption, and no need to think about dinner or tea, for the household
managed that, and left her with her Marianne, and the dreadful Fanny Dashwood, and bright Lizzy Bennet, and stiff, unseeing Darcy who didn’t consider her worth a dance at first. This was Jane Austen’s world, where justice reigned, as it rarely did outside those walls. But here the stiff-necked and cruel got at least some comeuppance, and girls like her married both well and for love.

  But without that room? Without any room? For apparently in Bath they were going not even to a rented apartment, but to a relative’s house, to pitch up for a while, while they looked for a place that was both affordable and not, her mother hoped, dreary. A place where appearances could be maintained without the requisite expense. Which might, in a resort town like Bath, take some time.

  In the meantime, “the girls,” Jane Austen and her nearly thirty-year-old sister Cassandra, were to pack their bags and come away with what they could carry. The rest they would leave in the house for their brother and his wife, a former friend whom Jane Austen was liking less all the time. When it was suggested she give her desk to one of her nieces, even a favorite niece, she bristled, though, as always, with that wit. “You are very kind in planning presents for me to make,” she wrote to her sister, “& my Mother has shewn me exactly the same attention—but as I do not chuse to have Generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.”

  But what she chose or didn’t choose had ever less to do with anything or anybody. She was one of the “girls,” dependent, unmarried; a nice aunt to the nieces and nephews who laughed at her bonnet behind her back. A looming problem to her brothers and their wives, who were concurring among themselves that the moment had passed for her, that brief time when young women stood, all in a row, on the stage of life with the world’s eyes upon them with some interest, and one pair of eyes, if all goes correctly, with enough interest to stop roving down the row and remain fixed.