Jane Austen Read online

  Another possible explanation for Lady Knatchbull’s embarrassment is that Jane Austen was animated. In 1838, Fulwar-William Fowle, who was born in 1791, remembered her as ‘pretty, certainly pretty - bright and a good deal of colour in her face - like a doll - no, that would not give at all the idea for she had so much expression - quite a child, very lively and full of humour- most amiable, most beloved…’ Fulwar-William said she was attractive, animated and delightful. But expressiveness was not valued by Victorian society matrons. The fashionable manner was a haughty reserve, an icy indifference.

  Nor might Lady Knatchbull have approved the topics of her aunt’s letters. Writing from London in 1814, Jane hoped her little niece Cassandra, her brother Charles’s eldest girl, had ‘found my bed comfortable last night and has not filled it with fleas’. In her next letter, Jane writes resignedly, ‘If Cassandra has filled my bed with fleas, I am sure they must bite herself.’ This may have been a family joke, or perhaps the little girl, then aged eight, did have fleas. Either way, Lady Knatchbullwould not have been amused and would have thought any mention of parasites in poor taste.

  Jane Austen, two days after her twenty-third birthday, wrote to Cassandra: ‘My mother continues hearty, her appetite and nights are very good, but her bowels are still not entirely settled, and she sometimes complains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, and a liver disorder.’ When Lady Knatchbull’s son, the first Lord Brabourne, edited Jane Austen’s letters for publication in 1884, he excised the references to bowels and to fleas, together with ones to bad breath and pregnancy. He censored Jane’s irritated references to her brother James, and softened her anger at the way married women became breeding machines. He insisted that while a vein of ‘good-natured satire’ might be found in the letters and conversations of many of the Austen family no malice ever lurked beneath. No one, he emphasized, was in reality more kind-hearted and considerate of other people’s feelings than Jane. This concern with a ‘reality’ at odds with the evidence suggests that Lord Brabourne’s celebrated great-aunt needed, in his view, some apologizing for. Jane’s letters were only too often demolition jobs on the neighbours.

  Jane grew up in the last quarter of the plain-spoken eighteenth century among clever and interesting relatives, who expressed themselves with frankness, elegance and precision, in conversation and in letters. Her mother composed messages in verse, her father was a classical scholar, and her elder brothers published a satirical Tory journal which offered burlesques on the sentimental literature of the day Her earliest works were comic parodies along similar lines. Her mature works are social comedies ending, after difficulties and misunderstandings have been overcome, in marriage. Her pleasant female characters are rewarded with loving husbands, her unpleasant ones remain single or are caught in bad marriages. Among possible motives for writing are wish-fulfilment and resentment. Both have been detected in the novels of ‘gentle Jane’, who could be scathing. After she died, her brother Henry wrote, ‘Though the frailties, foibles and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection, yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness.’

  Henry lied, probably in defence of what he thought of as his sister’s reputation, or he may not have seen the letters to Cassandra, with their touches of black humour. Jane Austen could never resist a joke, even one about an acquaintance ‘brought to bed yesterday of a dead child’, prematurely born because of a fright. Jane pretended to think the stillbirth was caused by the mother happening ‘by chance to look at her husband’. This appalling sick joke has the power to make us wince, even today Dead babies are not funny. Certain of her admirers dismiss these ‘remarks in bad taste’ as aberrations, nothing to do with ‘dear Jane’. On the contrary, they express an important part of her personality. She could be savage in her comments about people, the real people she moved among; and when it comes to her invented characters, she makes them expose themselves in all their awfulness.

  Jane was, though, also warm and affectionate. She and Cassandra, who were less than three years apart, loved each other deeply. With only two years’ formal education, they had small chance to develop the school and college friendships which became so important for women in later generations. In their day, parents were often remote and families large. Children were likely to make themselves into tightly knit groups. Jane liked first cousins to be friends, as they were, she said, but one remove from brother and sister. Her relatives emphasized her attachment to family, but while Jane Austen cannot be understood in isolation from her relatives, the account of her they handed down to us should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

  2

  Origins

  JANE AUSTEN was born on 16 December 1775. Her mother had had a long and difficult pregnancy, the baby arriving a month later than expected. Her delighted father, the Revd George Austen, described her as a ‘present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion’. He wrote to his sister-in-law:

  You have doubtless been for some time in expectation of hearing from Hampshire, and perhaps wondered a little we were in old age grown such bad reckoners but so it was, for Cassy certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago: however last night the time came, and without a great deal of warning, everything was soon happily over. We have now another girl … She is to be Jenny…

  Calculation of dates was important in those days, when there were no chemical pregnancy tests. The Austens should have been able to work out their dates, for this was Mrs Austen’s seventh confinement. The little girl who would later achieve worldwide fame was called Jenny, a recognized diminutive of Jane, within the family circle. Nicknames were used: among Jane’s brothers, James was ‘Jemmy’, Edward was ‘Neddy’ and Francis Frank’.

  George Austen was ‘old’ only in experience of fatherhood, not in years, being only in his mid-forties when Jane arrived. He came from an old Kentish family who had manufactured woollen cloth and were picturesquely known as ‘the Grey Coats of Kent’. George’s ancestor John Austen of Horsmonden, Kent, was married to Joan Berry in 1584. At his death John owned land in Kent and in Sussex. John and Joan had a large family. One of their sons, Francis Austen (1600-87), set up as a manufacturer, doing well enough to buy a pair of Tudor manor houses, Grovehurst and Broadford, which descended down the generations. Francis’s son John married Jane Atkins, and fathered another John Austen, who married Elizabeth Weller. Only after his death did his widow realize that he had left nothing but debts. A resourceful woman, Elizabeth sold what she could and moved to Sevenoaks, Kent, where she set up a boarding house and sent her sons to the grammar school without fees in return for taking care of the Master and some of the boys. She knew the importance of education.

  One of her sons, Francis Austen, was apprenticed to a lawyer, and set up for himself ‘with £800 and a bundle of pens’, according to his great-nephew Henry, and prospered. Francis’s younger brother William (1701-37) was Jane Austen’s grandfather. William was a surgeon, who married the widow of another surgeon, Rebecca Walter. Rebecca’s father, Sir George Hampson, was a baronet. The widowed Mrs Walter had a son of her own, who became the father of Jane Austen’s half-cousin Philadelphia (Thila’), not to be confused with George Austen’s sister Philadelphia Hancock.

  Among the four children of William and Rebecca was Jane Austen’s father, George, born in 1731. Rebecca died while George was still a toddler and the children had a stepmother, Susannah Kelk. According to family tradition Susannah was not kind to them. William died when his son George was six years old. Susannah, who had been left nothing in William’s will, took no interest in the young orphans, unrelated to her. William’s brother Stephen, a publisher, took in George and his two surviving sisters, Philadelphia and Leonora, but resented the children as a burden and neglected them.

  Uncle Francis Austen, by now a successful solicitor and landowner, who dressed in sober grey and wore a dignified wig, took over the care of the boy George. Francis was an astute man of business, agent to the
Duke of Dorset at Knole in Kent. Jane Austen’s brother Henry, aged nine, met his great-uncle when he was eighty-two. A burly man with a heavy jaw and tight-lipped mouth, he exuded power. ‘I think he was born in Anne’s reign, and was of course a smart man of George the First’s. It is a sort of privilege to have seen and conversed with such a model of a hundred years since,’ Henry recalled. Francis had married two women of wealth and persuaded his eldest son’s godmother, Viscountess Falkland, to leave him £100,000.

  George was sent at Francis’s expense to Tonbridge School and went on a closed scholarship, reserved for a Tonbridge pupil, to St John’s College, Oxford, at sixteen, in those days not unusually young. He had a sweet temper and a sunny disposition, despite his early privations. After graduating he returned to Tonbridge School as a teacher, was ordained deacon in Oxford in 1754 and was priested a year later. He combined teaching with being Rector of Shipbourne in Kent.

  Requirements for a career in the Anglican Church were not exacting. The only preparation necessary was a degree from one of the two universities. When Ben Lefroy, husband of George’s granddaughter Anna, later presented himself for ordination, the bishop asked him only two questions: was he the son of Mrs Lefroy of Ashe, and had he married a Miss Austen? That George Austen was more conscientious than most is proved by his taking a bachelor’s degree in divinity in 1760, again funded by his connection with Tonbridge School.

  He became a part-time curate, thanks to family help. Although the Archbishop of Canterbury earned £25,000 annually, many livings brought in as little as £100 a year, which is all George’s parish of Steventon was worth. Because salaries were so low, ‘pluralism’ (later frowned on) was common. Those who could get more than one appointment were known as ‘gallopers’, because they hurried about on horseback to take services at their various churches. Gallopers could not always manage to fulfil all their duties and too many churches and graveyards tumbled into decay. Adjacent parishes, such as those held by George after 1773, represented good luck indeed. Many clerics were absentees, living lives of pleasure and possibly excess, and merely drawing their stipends without doing anything to earn them though they might appoint curates on starvation wages, sometimes as little as thirty pounds a year. It was not unknown for others to do one service on Sundays and communion once a quarter.

  At the age of twenty-seven clever, hard-working George returned to his college as chaplain. This appointment made him a Fellow, and his college chaplaincy was augmented by a university job as well: he was known as the ‘handsome proctor’. The proctor is responsible for discipline among the undergraduates. He had a slim, erect figure and bright hazel eyes, even though they were on the small side, eyes of a colour which his daughter Jane inherited. His hair went prematurely white. Even at seventy it was curly and described by his granddaughter Anna as beautiful. As a young man he wore a wig with sausage curls above the ears.

  Fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were not allowed to marry but family connections again came to the rescue. Once ordained, a young clergyman had to wait for a living to become vacant. Bishops and deans were appointed by the Crown, but parish clergy were appointed some by the Crown, some by Cathedral chapters, and many by private patrons, landowners like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. As forty-eight per cent of livings were in private hands, it was important for an aspiring clergyman to know the right people. Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice has every reason to be pleased with the patronage of Lady Catherine, who has given him his living, which brought with it a snug parsonage and dinner at the great house twice a week, followed by a ride home in her ladyship’s carriage. A distant cousin, Thomas Knight of Godmersham Park, in 1761 made George Rector of Steventon, a village on the northern border of Hampshire. Thomas Knight owned extensive tracts of land in Hampshire and Kent, which provided livings for various relatives and friends. Such nepotism was considered right and proper, a responsible use of influence. Benefices were looked on as a fond for the provision of younger sons of gentry and nobility.

  Steventon is a remote hamlet, still accessible only by narrow, winding lanes. Nowadays these lanes are surfaced and in good repair, but in the eighteenth century they were no more than rough, muddy cart tracks, fall of ruts. The rectory stood near the main road into the village. The small grey Early English church of St Nicholas, with characteristic lancet windows and dating from the thirteenth century, stands higher up on the hill behind it, set apart from the village.

  The stipend of £100 a year was not enough to live on, but a rectory entitled George to glebe land, which he farmed, and to tithes which he had trouble in collecting. Originally tithes represented one-tenth of the layman’s produce but by a slow process of erosion, and after the Enclosure Acts which privatized the common lands on which the poor had grazed their animals, they were often changed from goods in kind to money theoretically handed over by landowners in whose hands the livings rested. The system was complicated, and the revenue unreliable. Apples were subject to tithe, but windfalls uncertain until the courts decided they should be included. A bad harvest could impoverish the priest as well as his flock. Scanty rural populations produced meagre tithings.

  George also rented Cheesedown Farm from his patron and worked it with the help of a bailiff, John Bond.

  Aged thirty-three, George married Cassandra Leigh, who was nine years younger. She had been reluctant to give up her freedom but needed a home for her recently widowed mother. George was remarkably handsome so the sacrifice can hardly have been great. The marriage took place in Bath, at the church of St Swithin, Walcot. The ceremony was conducted by the Revd Thomas Powys, in the presence of Cassandra’s brother James Leigh-Perrot and her sister, Jane Leigh, on 26 April 1764. Quiet weddings were then the custom. Cassandra was married in a red wool riding dress, which she wore without buying any new ones for her first two years of marriage, and which was eventually cut down to make a coat and breeches probably for her son Francis to wear in the hunting field. Jane Austen’s mother knew, of necessity, how to practise thrift. Their honeymoon was a one-night stop at Andover on their way to Hampshire.

  Cassandra Leigh was a rector’s daughter and granddaughter on her mother’s side of an Oxford physician, Dr John Walker. A sincere Christian, she knew what the life of a clergyman’s wife was like. There were eight clergymen in her family, and when her daughter Jane wrote Pride and Prejudice Jane’s mother enjoyed reading about Mr Collins. Not only Jane’s father but two of her brothers and four of her cousins were clergymen. As well as the landed gentry on whose periphery she moved, Jane Austen drew on her own family to write about the classes she knew best, including well-connected, but not rich, clergymen. Several of her characters marry clergymen: Mrs Grant and Mrs Norris have already done so in Mansfield Park when the story starts, and Fanny ends up married to the Revd Edmund Bertram. The heroes of Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility’, Henry Tilney and Edward Ferrars, are both clergymen. The secondary characters Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, Miss Augusta Hawkins of Bristol in Emma, and Henrietta Musgrove in Persuasion all marry parsons.

  Cassandra Leigh was well connected. Not only was her uncle Master of Balliol College, Oxford, famous for his wit and mentioned in a letter from Mrs Hester Thrale to Dr Samuel Johnson, but she was the great-niece of a Duke of Chandos. Her father was the Revd Thomas Leigh, Rector of Harpsden (pronounced ‘Harden’), Oxfordshire, previously a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. All Souls is a distinguished company of scholars which has no teaching function. Cassandra, like several of her relatives, was named after her great-aunt the Duchess. She was descended from Sir Thomas Leigh (1498-1571), knighted by Queen Elizabeth I while he was Lord Mayor of London. Among other relatives were William Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, and his son William Pitt the Younger, who was Tory Prime Minister from 1783 to 1801 and again from 1804 to 1806. She was also related to William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister, and to the family of another Prime Minister, Sir Winston Chu
rchill (1874-1965).

  At the age of six little Cassandra Leigh impressed her uncle, the Master of Balliol, with her cleverness and her ability to write verses. Yet, because she was a girl, her intellectual gifts were not nurtured. We do not know whether this made her angry or whether she accepted this treatment as woman’s lot. Her granddaughter Anna said it was regrettable that Cassandra’s formal education had been neglected, but commented that her quick apprehension and retentive memory made up for lack of instruction. Anna added that she was a quick-witted woman with plenty of sparkle and spirit in her talk, who could write an excellent letter, either in prose or verse. These made no pretence to poetry, but were simply playful common sense in rhyme. She had been taught to read and the art of fine needlework by her aunt, Miss Anne Perrot. In ability, if not in intellectual culture, she was a worthy wife for George. She wrote fluent and elegant letters. She would inherit, like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, £1,000 on her mother’s death, which with other investments brought her in an annual income of £140.

  She was dark-haired, retaining the colour till late in life, and more than ordinarily good-looking, though her face and lips were thin and by fifty she had lost her front teeth. She lacked confidence in her own attractions, however, because her sister Jane Leigh, who became Mrs

  Cooper, was an acknowledged beauty Cassandra Leigh’s eyes were large and grey, with clearly marked eyebrows, and her features were good.

  The Austens were a handsome, elegant couple, both with aristocratic aquiline noses, and they produced attractive children. Steventon rectory was in bad repair so George and Cassandra settled at the neighbouring hamlet of Deane, where the rectory was conveniently empty. They paid rent of £20 a year to the absentee incumbent for a low, damp house with small inconvenient rooms, but moved to the rectory at Steventon, seven miles from Basingstoke, in 1774, the year before Jane was born. George’s stepmother, Susannah, had died and the house she was living in was sold. George’s share was £1,200, so he could afford to do up his house and make it habitable. The removal was wearisome and the ride on a cart along a bumpy rutted mud track was only made tolerable for Mrs Austen by the provision of a feather bed.