Jane Austen Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Jane Austen’ Family Tree

  1 WHAT WAS SHE LIKE?

  2 ORIGINS

  3 SIBLINGS AND SOCIETY

  4 UPBRINGING

  5 FLIRTATIONS AND SCANDALS

  6 THE MARRIAGE MARKET

  7 BROTHERS AND THEIR WIVES

  8 THE BUTTERFLY AND THE POKER

  9 DANCING AND SHOPPING, 1796-1800

  10 EXILE, 1801

  11 BATH, 1801

  12 LYME AND BATH, 1804-5

  13 STONELEIGH ABBEY, 1806

  14 SOUTHAMPTON, 1806-9

  15 VISITING

  16 GRIEF AT GODMERSHAM, 1808

  17 REGENERATION

  18 CHAWTON, 1809

  19 PUBLICATION, 1811-12

  20 A BESTSELLER, 1813

  21 A BRIEF PEACE, 1814

  22 ROYAL FAVOUR, 1815-16

  23 SHIPWRECK, BANKRUPTCY AND OTHER DISASTERS, 1816

  24 WINCHESTER, 1817

  Selective Bibliography

  Copyright © 1997, 2011 by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  Family Tree © 1997, 2011 by Stephen Dew

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-657-8

  Also by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  CHARLOTTE BRONTE: TRUCULENT SPIRIT

  CULTURE SHOCK

  LAURENCE STERNE: RIDDLES AND MYSTERIES

  MARGARET DRABBLE: A READER’S GUIDE

  SAMUEL RICHARDSON: PASSION AND PRUDENCE

  TEN GREAT ENGLISH NOVELISTS

  To Jean Gooder

  I have now attained the true art of letter-writing which, we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you as fast as I could the whole of this letter.

  Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, 5 January 1801

  Preface

  Jane Austen was never secure financially and was less secure socially than many readers of her novels have assumed. She belonged not to the squirearchy but to the upper end of the professional middle class and spent her entire life as a poor relation. Although socializing with richer neighbours and visits to landed relatives gave her an insight into the way wealthy people lived, it was very different from her own life of genteel poverty, especially after her father’s retirement. She lived on the outside looking in. Correctly speaking, she was not even ‘Miss Austen’. As a younger daughter, less admired than her sister, who took precedence of her, she was merely ‘Miss Jane Austen’. Seniority counted. Her immediate family had brains, energy and titled connections, but not much money. They were constantly in difficulties. As a single woman without money, she was marginal to society. Her equivocal position moulded her outlook, and her surviving letters betray moments of bitterness. Although a rich man proposed, her obstinate heart prevented her from marrying except for love. Despite a few years of growing reputation as a writer, which she keenly enjoyed, hers was a life of disappointment and frustration. Her criticisms of other writers show she knew the value of her own work and she fretted that it was not better paid. She admitted being ‘greedy’ for money and grudged Walter Scott his place among the novelists when he was already rich and famous as a poet. Such recognition as she received came late in her short life and during her lifetime only four of her books were published, all of them anonymously.

  Acknowledgements

  For generous help and advice I have to thank Tom Carpenter, Keith Crook, Rodney Dale, Sylvia Greybourne, David Keane, Gina Keane, Jascha Kessler, Susan McCartan, Derek McCulloch, Ken May, Brian Sibley, Ken Turner, David Weeks and Margaret Wilson. Yvonne Holland’s sympathetic and creative editing has been invaluable: and for his proofreading skills, inwardness with Jane Austen, and constant support, I am grateful to my husband, Michael Grosvenor Myer.

  Jane Austen’ Family Tree

  1

  What Was She Like?

  PEOPLE WHO KNEW Jane Austen described her as pretty. She was attractive, both in appearance and in personality. The only authenticated likeness is an amateurish pencil and watercolour drawing, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, by Jane’s elder sister, Cassandra. Yet Cassandra’s drawing shows a woman more sharp-featured than appealing: the eyes are, large and beautiful, glancing keenly at something to the left of the picture, and the eyebrows are well marked. Her curls escape charmingly from the cap, but there are lines of disappointment running from nose to mouth, and the mouth itself looks small and mean. She looks like a peevish hamster. Her niece Anna Austen Lefroy, daughter of Jane Austen’s eldest brother, dismissed the portrait as hideously unlike.

  An even more mysterious picture of Jane by Cassandra is a pencil and watercolour sketch giving a back view of her in a pale blue dress, and in which most of the face is concealed by a large blue bonnet.

  Although it was said by a fellow author that her cheeks were ‘a little too fair when she was a young girl, she was agreed to be good-looking, with a fine complexion of a rich colour, brown rather than fair. Her reddish-brown hair curled naturally. A lock survives but time has bleached it. Her nose was narrow and possibly rather long, like those of her mother and sister.

  In 1944 a bookseller found a profile silhouette pasted into a copy of the second edition of Mansfield Park (the 1816 edition, the first having been published in 1814). Unfortunately there was no bookplate or other evidence of ownership of this volume but underneath the silhouette an unknown hand has written ‘L'aimable Jane.' This cannot refer to a character in the novel, for though Pride and Prejudice has Jane Bennet and Emma has Jane Fairfax there is no Jane in Mansfield Park. So this tantalizing outline is presumed to be a portrait of Jane herself. Jane’s niece Caroline Austen, Anna’s half-sister, recorded that her Aunt Jane was the first person she consciously thought of as pretty. This silhouette picture shows us a young woman who could certainly be described as pretty, and probably less than thirty years old. The sitter has neat features balanced by a trim chignon worn fairly high, a graceful neck and shoulders, and a high, firm bosom. She is wearing some sort of necklace.

  Another silhouette owned by the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral, and ‘supposedly done by herself in 1815’, shows a woman with the Austen family nose and apparently not wearing the cap she habitually wore.

  At one time a full-length portrait of a young teenager, which may just be by Johann Zoffany (who died in 1810), was thought to show Jane Austen, but costume experts have confidently dated it at about 1805, when Jane was thirty. At that time, Jane’s father died, and she and her widowed mother were reduced to poverty. They could not have risen to the extravagance of employing a fashionable portrait painter. It has been suggested that the artist is in fact Ozias Humphrey (or Humphreys or Humphries) and that the face is Jane’s, but the bone structure looks different from that suggested by Cassandra’s sketch. The painting shows a round face
, unlike the pointed chin of Cassandra’s picture. It may be of a younger, distant cousin also named Jane Austen.

  When the Memoir by Jane’s nephew the Revd James-Edward Austen-Leigh was published in 1869, although dated 1870, a Mrs Charlotte Maria Beckford, who as a child had known Jane in middle age, was disappointed with the portrait used as the frontispiece. Cassandra’s original drawing had been softened and falsified in a miniature watercolour by a Mr Andrews of Maidenhead, the eyes enlarged, the mouth forced into a demure smile. This picture was a bland lie: it failed to tell any sort of truth about either Jane’s personality or her looks. The steel-engraved version of Mr Andrews’s picture was worse: it made her look smug instead of sharp, and sentimentalized her into a mimsy Victorian icon in a prettified cap with added ribbons and lace.

  Regrettably this travesty is still often reproduced. Only the pose and the costume bear any resemblance to Cassandra’s sketch of a wary, watchful Regency lady. Mrs Beckford remembered a tall, thin, spare person with very high cheekbones, colour in her cheeks, and sparkling eyes, which were not large but joyous and intelligent. She said Jane’s face was by no means as broad and plump as represented. She recalled Jane’s keen sense of humour and, like Jane’s own nieces, said children liked her because she entered into their games.

  Perhaps some clue to what Jane looked like are two portraits of her niece Anna Austen Lefroy in middle age. Anna resembled her aunt in colouring, with the same chestnut hair and hazel eyes, and in figure. She looked, too, like Jane’s brothers, of whom we have convincing likenesses, and fits Mrs Beckford’s description. We know that Jane’s step was light and firm, that her speaking voice was sweet - she excelled in reading aloud - but we cannot find a real face. However, enough evidence exists to reconstruct something of the real woman, who was more interesting and less inhibited than we have been allowed to believe.

  Jane’s was the restricted life of a respectable spinster, though her age was violent and raffish enough. The American Revolution happened the year she was born, 1775, and the Bastille was stormed at the height of the French Revolution when she was thirteen. England was threatened with revolution, and was at war with France for a large part of her adult life. Invasion was feared. Nor were England’s towns and countryside always safe and peaceful places to live. The Prince of Wales and his brother the Duke of York were robbed in broad daylight in London, near Berkeley Square. It was estimated that there were 100,000 criminals in London alone. Highwaymen lurked on Hounslow Heath. Thieves were hanged in public. On 23 February 1807 a triple hanging in London attracted a crowd of 40,000 people. In 1813 seventeen machine-breakers were publicly executed at York.

  Jane’s own conduct was blameless but she took a keen pleasure in gossip and the sensational. She read and enjoyed the Gothic horror novels she makes fun of in Northanger Abbey, She had a robust and wicked sense of humour and liked to tease her prim sister, Cassandra, by being outrageous. Her teenage writings deal flippantly with sibling rivalry, drunkenness, adultery, seduction, illegitimacy, destitution, suicide, mercenary marriage, murder, prison, the gallows, deformity, speech impediment, galloping consumption, steel mantraps, physical injury. There is allusion in Sense and Sensibility to duelling, in Mansfield Park to sodomy, in Emma to slavery, in Pride and Prejudice to prostitution.

  Jane was a keen reader of newspapers. Tantalizingly, she mentions ‘political correspondents’ with whom she discussed the issues of the day but these unknown correspondents would have seen no reason to keep her letters. The letters that have survived, especially those to her sister, Cassandra, are full of gossip and family news, with occasional flashes of spite and anger. They can be epigrammatic: ‘Lady Elizabeth Hatton and Annamaria called here this morning; yes, they called, but I do not think I can say any more about them. They came and they sat and they went.’ They are also full of astringent comments on her acquaintance and constant wistful remarks about not being rich. Cassandra, fortunately for us, had the foresight to keep Jane’s letters but in old age looked them over and burned most of them. More letters were destroyed than survive and those that did survive had bits chopped out.

  Jane’s surviving relatives, particularly those who lived into the second half of the nineteenth century, pretended the waspishness of the letters and the biting satire of the novels did not represent the real woman. They were concerned to gentrify her, to portray her as cosy and sweet, ignoring the vinegary vein which fascinates us. They censored her letters and doctored her image. She was tougher, more irritable and more sardonic than they liked to acknowledge.

  Jane’s letters express appreciation and envy of the ease, elegance and luxury to be found at Godmersham Park, the home of her rich brother, Edward, who had, like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, been adopted by wealthy relatives, the Knights. Edward was the father of Jane Austen’s eldest and favourite niece, Fanny Knight, who became Lady Knatchbull. At the age of eighty-five, Fanny wrote to her younger sister Marianne:

  Yes, my love, it is very true that Aunt Jane from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent, and if she had lived fifty years later she would have been in many respects more suitable to our more refined tastes. They were not rich and the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre and they of course though superior in mental powers and cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes - but I think in later life their intercourse with Mrs Knight (who was very fond of and kind to them) improved them both and Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of ‘commonness’ (if such an expression is allowable) and teach herself to be more refined, at least in intercourse with people in general. Both the Aunts (Cassandra and Jane) were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the world and its ways (I mean as to fashion etc) and if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent, and the kindness of Mrs Knight who used often to have one or other of the sisters staying with her, they would have been, though not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society and its ways.

  Old Mrs Knight had adopted Fanny’s father, Jane Austen’s brother Edward, as her heir when Edward was sixteen. Fanny, unlike her aunts, was brought up in wealth and comfort. We can only wonder what sort of refinement the fastidious Jane Austen can have been deficient in and what sort of ‘common-ness’ she might have had to grow out of. She criticized a Mrs Britton in a letter written in November 1813: ‘she amuses me very much with her affected refinement and elegance’. At the same time she admired the manners of Lady Honeywood for their ‘ease and good humour and unaffectedness’. Who could quarrel with these comments on good manners?

  Possibly Lady Knatchbull remembered Jane and Cassandra wearing pattens, wooden soles mounted on iron rings to raise shoes above the mud. Later pattens were worn only by the poor. Perhaps Jane’s pronunciation was old-fashioned? Since her Oxford-educated brother Henry praised the sweetness of her speech, and both her parents would have been well-spoken, a Hampshire accent is unlikely. Purity of accent was valued in the better educated women of the gentry class in the eighteenth century. Her brother James’s daughters, Anna and Caroline, both of whom loved her dearly, emphasize Jane’s charm of manner. They admit she was not well dressed, as she could not afford to be, but Lady Knatchbull's discomfort seems to have deeper resonances. Embarrassed by her aunt Jane Austen, Lady Knatchbull chooses to emphasize her own glory as a member of the rich Knight family (by adoption), though her paternal grandmother, Mrs Austen, had aristocratic Leigh antecedents. Lady Knatchbull's mother was the expensively educated daughter of a baronet and may have found Jane provincial or uncomfortably sharp. Jane the spinster aunt was not fully appreciated, according to Fanny’s cousin Anna, tolerated rather than loved in the wealthy, well-bred but unintellectual Godmersham household where Fanny grew up, though Fanny was appreciative enough of her aunt’s talent to read Pride and Prejudice aloud once more to her sister Louisa fifty years after Jane�
�s death.

  Lady Knatchbull has been censured for this notorious judgment as heartless and snobbish but Jane was just too plain-spoken to suit a later generation. Fanny Knatchbull's letter reflects the change in manners between the Regency and the later Victorian age, when under the influence of the Evangelical movement the middle classes became careful to distinguish themselves from the foul-mouthed, blaspheming proletariat by fastidious avoidance of any expressions which could be stigmatized as ‘coarse’ or ‘common’. Bad language became known in polite society as ‘Billingsgate’, the name of the fish market, where the swearing by the porters was notorious.

  Jane and Cassandra were sometimes embarrassed by their mother’s cheerful indifference to what they felt to be propriety: they were afraid she was likely to darn stockings in the parlour in front of visitors. As the great-niece of the Duke of Chandos she had perhaps married beneath her and could afford an aristocratic indifference to petty notions of correctness. In 1805 Jane Austen described one acquaintance as being, like other young ladies, considerably more genteel than her parents. The word is used without irony as a term of unqualified praise. The notion of progress in politeness was already established. By the time Fanny Knatchbull wrote the infamous letter to her younger sister Marianne, the word ‘genteel’ had lost any cachet it might once have had and was considered a vulgarism. Today it implies an uneasy, affected anxiety about polished manners, and nervous use of euphemisms.

  The progress towards prudery had already started by the 1780s, when the term ‘pregnant’ was considered more polite than the traditional expression ‘with child’, and instead of being ‘brought to bed’ or ‘delivered’, a woman was ‘confined’ or even had an ‘accouchement’ as in French. In her letters of the early 1800s, Jane Austen unblushingly uses the older forms. But even as early as 1818, the year after she died, Dr Thomas Bowdler brought out the Family Shakespeare^ with the bawdy cut out. The range of permissible topics for conversation dwindled as the nineteenth century became increasingly mealy-mouthed.