Jane Austen Read online

  Mrs Cawley then took the girls with their cousin Jane Cooper to Southampton where she and the children caught a ‘putrid fever’, the name then current for both typhus fever and diphtheria. Mrs Cawley did not bother to notify the parents but Jane Cooper wrote to her mother who came to fetch her and the Austen girls. Mrs Cooper caught the illness and died. The children narrowly escaped death. Infectious diseases, before modern drugs, could easily and with shocking rapidity prove fatal, especially to children. Another killer disease at the time was ‘putrid sore throat’, or gangrenous pharyngitis, mentioned in Jane Austen’s letters as having killed a boy at Eton. Mrs Cooper’s husband did not remarry. He brought up his son Edward (whom Jane Austen did not like) and daughter Jane alone. He gave Cassandra and Jane mementoes of their dead aunt: Cassandra had an emerald and diamond ring, Jane a headband which she later wore to dances.

  The ability to dance was recognized as necessary if a girl was to mix in society, and parents otherwise neglectful of their daughters’ development made sure that the girls never went without dancing lessons. The elaborate routines of country dances, minuets and cotillions had to be memorized and the exercise of dancing would, it was hoped, lead to a graceful carriage. Good deportment was the mark of a lady, who was also expected to play the pianoforte or the harp, and, if she had a good voice, to sing. Accomplishment was supposed to add up to eligibility.

  The Austen girls next went with the motherless Jane Cooper to the Abbey School at Reading, which may have been like Mrs Goddard’s school in Emma, where girls might ‘scramble themselves into a little education’.

  Boys went to grammar or public school and then to Oxford or Cambridge, at that time the only two universities in England, with students numbering only a few hundred. The universities exercised an influence out of all proportion to their size, preparing a social élite for the professions of the Church and the law, or in some cases for a life of gentlemanly leisure. Girls did the best they could. Elizabeth Bridges, a daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, baronet, and who was to marry Jane’s brother Edward, went with her sisters to a grand girls’ boarding school in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, known as the ladies’ Eton’, where there was heavy emphasis on etiquette and they were required to practise the art of descending gracefully from a carriage. Little else was learned except French, music and dancing.

  It was rare for girls to go to school of any kind, as many fathers disapproved. In the late eighteenth century governesses were employed only by the very wealthy and grand, like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, who is surprised that the Bennet girls did not have one. Neither country gentlemen like Mr Bennet nor clergymen like George Austen aspired to employing governesses, though his rich son Edward and his wife, Elizabeth, had governesses for their five daughters while their six sons went to public school. Often children were taught to read by their mothers. It was usual to start with the Psalms. In Northanger Abbey Mrs Morland, a clergy wife, teaches her eleven children to read, write and number.

  Jane as a child owned The History of Goody Two-Shoes and a French textbook, Fables Choisies, given her on 5 December 1783, together with an anthology, Elegant Extracts, Her brother Edward gave her a copy of Dr Percival's A Father’s Instructions to his Children, consisting of Tales, Fables and Reflections; designed to promote the love of virtue, a taste for knowledge, and an early acquaintance with the works of Nature. She also had a copy of Ann Murry’s Mentoria: or, The Young Ladies’ Instructor, from which she picked up general knowledge.

  The headmistress of the Abbey School was a Miss Sarah Hackett who used as her professional name ‘Mrs Latournelle’ to give authenticity to her credentials as a French teacher, though she knew not a word of that language. She was a stout woman with a wooden leg, who never did any work in the afternoons. Her dress was always the same, with a white muslin kerchief round her neck, a muslin apron, short sleeves, cuffs and ruffles, with a breast bow to match the bow on her cap, both being flat with two notched ends. She may have been a former actress, for her conversation centred on plays and acting, gossip about the private lives of performers and even backstage anecdotes. This must have been more entertaining for schoolgirls than French irregular verbs. She acted as housekeeper, giving out clothes to be washed, ordering dinner and making tea. There was also a Miss Pitts, whose French was fluent and who played and sang well and was an excellent needlewoman. The curriculum comprised writing, spelling, French, needlework, drawing, music and dancing. Jane was happy enough there to write later, I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school.’ At this time her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, née Hancock, wrote to her cousin Phila Walter that all Uncle George Austen’s children seemed to be everything their parents could wish.

  The school itself was in part of the ancient Abbey building, formerly occupied by Benedictine monks. It consisted of an antique gateway with rooms above its arch and with vast staircases either side, whose balustrades had originally been gilt. Pupils were received in a wainscotted parlour, hung round with chenille representations of tombs and weeping willows. There were several miniatures over the tall mantelshelf. There was a beautiful wild garden, where the girls were allowed to wander under tall trees on hot summer evenings. They could climb the embankment and look down on the Abbey church, begun by King Henry I and consecrated by St Thomas à Becket. As Jane Austen wrote at fifteen in her facetious History of England, the abolition by King Henry VIII of religious houses ‘and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general’.

  In 1785, Jane and Cassandra’s brother Edward and Jane Cooper’s brother Edward called at the school and took their sisters out for a meal at an inn, which shocked their Victorian descendants as most unseemly. Their cousin the Revd Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop called to see the girls and tipped them half a guinea each.

  Mr Austen had difficulty paying the school fees and the girls left after two years in 1787. Their stay had cost their father £140, as the fees were the same as he charged for board and tuition, £35 per pupil per year.

  Schools at that time offered girls little more than ‘finishing school’ was to do later. In Sense and Sensibility the brainless Charlotte Palmer’s landscape in coloured silks is sarcastically described by the narrator as ‘proof of her having spent seven years at a great school in town’. Moralists criticized the fashion for superficial and showy accomplishments but there was little more solid on offer anywhere. Girls’ boarding schools were not widespread until later in the next century and both the universities were closed to women, as were the professions of medicine, the law, the Church, the army and the navy. Argument raged as to the nature and purpose of female education: many people thought that the only education necessary for girls was moral and religious training, which would help young women to sub-due their unruly passions. Some women internalized this ideology and took it on themselves to advise their own sex, insisting that opportunities to become generals, politicians, legislators or advocates would be wasted on mere females. Women were even discouraged from talking politics in mixed company. Jane Austen was interested in politics and read solid books on history. Nonetheless, women were popularly said to be ruled by their hearts, not their heads. Voices were raised against such prejudice, and some people argued that girls needed to be taught to think. Others pleaded for the teaching of English grammar, pointing out that while the French language was a fashionable subject, most young ladies remained grossly ignorant of their own.

  At home, the girls’ education was probably much like that of the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth tells Lady Catherine they were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary. When Jane was eleven her father was paying a drawing master. Jane’s family considered her to be talented in that direction, and Cassandra and Henry both drew. Jane wrote in a letter when she was forty that she did not have her niece’s ‘fondness for masters’. Fanny Knight’s music teacher, Mr Meyers, ‘gives his three lessons a week
- altering his days and his hours … just as he chooses, never very punctual and never giving good measure.’ Jane herself learned the pianoforte in her teens. Jane was fortunate because the instruments were so expensive they were a rare luxury in country parsonages. When Frank Churchill in Emma gives a pianoforte to his secret fiancée Jane Fairfax, the gift is munificent indeed, an amenity the impoverished Mrs Bates and her daughter could never have provided.

  If Mr and Mrs Austen could not afford to import many masters, the clever father and brothers filled the gap. James and Henry went to Oxford University, where James edited a periodical called The Loiterer.

  An elegant hand was considered important for letter-writing. Jane’s own letters are beautifully penned, their neat flowing handwriting sloping elegantly to the right. Only quill pens, which quickly wore down and needed recutting, were available to write with. Steel nibs did not come into general use until the mid-nineteenth century. In the circumstances, neat legible handwriting was important and the ability to write small made for economy in paper and postage. Members of Parliament had the privilege of sending mail for nothing, by signing letters above the address. This was called franking. Everybody else had to pay not when sending letters but on receiving them. When Jane was staying with maternal relatives at Stoneleigh Abbey in 1806, a Mr Holt Leigh, MP for Wigan in Lancashire, arrived and gave the family ‘franks’ for their letters so they could go for nothing.

  In Mansfield Park when Fanny is pining for home, Edmund encourages her to write to her brother William. ‘… it will cost William nothing … when you have written the letter, I will take it to my father to frank.’ Sir Thomas is an MP.

  Payment was according to weight, which is why single sheets were used economically, and sometimes ‘crossed’ - turned upside down and written between the lines, or written in both directions so that one line of writing was at right angles to another. Two sheets of paper meant ‘double postage’. Very penurious correspondents sometimes ‘double-crossed’ their letters. In November 1813 Jane received a ‘black and red letter’ from her brother Charles, written in black and crossed in red for clarity. Envelopes were hardly known and letters consisted of single sheets, folded and sealed with a thin wafer. Folding and sealing were necessary skills and while some people’s letters were loose and untidy, Jane’s were perfectly symmetrical, with the wafer always correctly placed. Although her own handwriting was neat and attractive, she thought it inferior to Cassandra’s. ‘I took up your letter again,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘and was struck by the prettiness of the hand, so small and so neat! I wish I could get as much on to a sheet of paper.’ Another time she wrote, ‘I am quite angry with myself for not writing closer; why is my alphabet so much more sprawly than yours?’ Ladies did not write ‘copperplate’ roundhand: that was for ledger clerks. ‘Ladies’ hand’, as it came later to be known, was a pointed style, enabling the reader to identify it as a woman’s writing.

  Jane was clever with her hands in general. ‘An artist cannot do anything slovenly,’ she wrote lightly in a letter. She excelled at spillikins, a game in which each player takes pieces of wood off a pile with a metal hook without disturbing the others.

  From her mother Jane learned the then essentially practical skills of needlework, including embroidery. She was specially good at overcasting and became expert at satin stitch, no easy accomplishment. A sampler made when she was twelve can be seen at Chawton Cottage, as can a patchwork quilt, as exquisite in design as in workmanship. Made, of course, entirely by hand, this full-sized quilt, whose weight cannot be negligible, is assembled with tiny, almost invisible, stitches of perfect evenness and tension. Mrs Austen and her daughters were expert needlewomen indeed. Jane refers to collecting the pieces of material for it in a letter of May 1811. As an adult, Jane made many of her own clothes and on one occasion had to take an outfit botched by a dressmaker to pieces and remodel it herself. Sometimes she wished it were possible to buy clothes ready-made. In her day all clothes were sewn by hand by tailors and dressmakers, some more skilful than others. She preferred quality to quantity, but was forced to count her pennies.

  Women rarely learned Latin or Greek, then the basis of male education. ‘Literacy’ at the time meant mastery of classical literature, not the ability to read English. The rare women who had shared their brothers’ lessons in the ancient languages, before the boys were sent away to school, and who found these studies of interest, were advised to keep quiet about it. Perhaps Mr Austen, who taught Latin to his own boys as well as to paying pupils, and cared enough about his daughters’ education to send them to boarding school, included them in these lessons, but if so Jane’s brothers do not mention it. She knew enough Latin to write 'Ex dono mei patris' (my father’s gift) in the manuscript book her father gave her when she was fifteen. Wit was dreaded in women and clever women learned to keep their tongues under control. As the narrator of Northanger Abbey remarks, ‘A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.’ Jane was well read in English literature: her favourite writers were William Cowper in verse and Dr Samuel Johnson in prose. Her copy of Johnson’s Rasselas, volume two, survives, with her signature in it. She had read Henry Fielding’s picaresque and outspoken novel Tom Jones, but preferred Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which she knew extremely well. She was familiar with Shakespeare and Milton, and in Persuasion Byron’s poetry is mentioned. There was not much money to spare but the Austens always bought books.

  Jane, like her character Fanny Price, was a quiet, shy girl. She was tall for her age and slender. When, in 1788, the family visited Great-uncle Francis, by now over ninety, at the Red House in Sevenoaks, her cousin Phila Walter cast upon her a cold eye. Phila was in her twenties and not very sympathetic to adolescents. She wrote to her brother that she preferred Cassandra, who talked well ‘The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve. They all spent the day with us, and the more I see of Cassandra the more I admire -Jane is whimsical and affected/ It is noteworthy that both the writer Mary Russell Mitford, a granddaughter of Dr Russell, the Rector of Ashe, and Phila stigmatized Jane as affected: possibly Jane was experimenting with the face she presented to the world and wondering how to contain her own wicked wit within socially acceptable bounds. The implied judgment that Henry was not handsome either is surprising, as the surviving portrait shows him with fine features. The Austens were a good-looking family. Perhaps Jane, in her turn, did not care much for Phila, who was censorious and two-faced. Their cousin Eliza de Feullide, née Hancock, however, described Cassandra and Jane in their teens as ‘perfect little beauties’. She reported to Phila when Jane was sixteen that Cassandra and Jane were both much grown and greatly improved in manners and looks. ‘They are I think equally sensible, and both so to a degree seldom met with, but still my heart gives the preference to Jane.’

  To be seventh in a family means that you can have only a limited share of attention. Cassandra was the elder girl and Jane grew up in her shadow, in a house full of boys, related and unrelated to them. Cassandra was always in demand at Rowling, Edward’s first married home, a manor house provided by Elizabeth’s relatives, and at Godmersham after he inherited in 1797, while Jane usually stayed behind. Jane may well have felt her clever brothers and Cassandra were more important, more highly valued, than herself. She was ten years younger than James, settled in his career as a clergyman, and possibly in awe of him.

  She may have felt too that she could not compete in what, at home and outside it, seemed to be a man’s world. The then current social morality discouraged assertiveness in girls, who were supposed to be cheerful and unselfish. The bluestockings of the mid-eighteenth century were no longer fashionable role models, if they ever had been. How could a girl with only reasonable prettiness and no fortune achieve recognition and respect? There were no competitive exams to challenge her, not even in music. Today’s seventeen-year-olds prove themselves by tak
ing exams and passing driving tests. Jane must often have felt crushed by her own lack of consequence in the world and the lack of opportunities to shine. In adult life she looked with amazement at the self-confidence of young people and asked half-humorously ‘What has become of all the shyness in the world?’

  She took refuge in becoming a shrewd observer. In her writings from the age of fifteen onwards she took apart the excessive sentiment and far-fetched sensationalism of current pulp fiction, especially in her short epistolary novel, Love and Friendship, She enjoyed being witty about her neighbours and the words she puts into the mouth of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice have often been understood as applying to her own practice: ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’

  Pride and Prejudice is a Cinderella story. All Jane Austen’s novels follow the romance pattern of happy marriage achieved after difficulties have been overcome. Her own life was very different, emotionally unfulfilled. She was far from unfeeling, but she cultivated detachment and avoided emotionalism. She became adept, in her letters and in her novels, at making jokes on painful subjects. It was her way of coping.

  5

  Flirtations and Scandals

  THE AUSTENS WARDED off boredom with family jokes, conundrums, home-made verses, and theatricals in the dining room or the barn. James was fond of writing prologues and epilogues. In 1782, when Jane was just seven, he produced Matilda, a ranting blank verse tragedy by Thomas Francklin, set in the time of the Norman Conquest. Edward spoke the prologue, Mr Austen’s pupil Tom Fowle the epilogue. Family mourning for their aunt Mrs Edward Cooper prevented festivities the next Christmas, but in July 1784 The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan was acted.