Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  Back in 1966 Tony Tanner (in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel) offered an explanation in which many people have found comfort ever since. ‘We know that amateur home theatricals were popular in her family,’ he wrote soothingly, ‘and by no means disapproved of as they are in the book’. He insisted that the Mansfield theatricals should be seen merely symbolically.

  There is, however, no reason to conflate the individual’s opinion with that of her family – on this subject, or any other. The Austen family was large and loud, sprawling and exuberant. Jane’s life was lived out within its affectionate, but restricting, boundaries. She would be buried simply as a member of it under an epitaph which described her only as a Christian and the ‘youngest daughter of the late Revd George Austen, formerly Rector of Steventon’, mentioning the family’s affection and sense of loss, and omitting entirely any reference to the extraordinary achievements of her life.

  Yet, Jane Austen was more than simply a part of her family, and the fact that theatricals took place around her when she was a child is no reason to suppose that her own opinion was at odds with the unequivocally disapproving authorial voice of Mansfield Park.14 However many layers of symbolism it may have, the description of Mansfield’s theatricals is fundamentally real. No modern-day member of an amateur dramatics company could deny that it lays bare the dark underbelly of his or her chosen hobby.

  Jane Austen gives an unflinching insider’s view of everything that is worst about amateur acting, from the concealed, but overwhelming, self-interest of Julia and Maria Bertram who each hope to have the best part in the play ‘pressed on her by the rest’15, to the self-indulgent over-rehearsal of favourite scenes by some actors, and the insidious, self-gratifying criticisms of others’ performances – ‘Mr Yates was in general thought to rant dreadfully . . . Mr Yates was disappointed in Henry Crawford . . . Tom Bertram spoke so quick he would be unintelligible . . .  Nobody would remember on which side they were to come in – nobody but the complainer would observe any directions’.16

  There can be no doubt that this detailed understanding of what can happen among a group of people – even people who are fond of one another – when ‘the inclination to act was awakened’17 came from real observation. It would seem that brother James’s annual productions in the Steventon barn were riven by jealousy, bad-feeling and unkindness. They were far from universally happy events, and his highly observant younger sister had reason to disapprove of them.

  Jane’s distrust of amateur theatricals, rather than being founded on prudery, seems to have arisen from a much more humane concern that the opportunity to perform released a tide of self-obsession which could temporarily render even kindly people insensitive to the feelings and needs of others. As Fanny Price, the quiet observer of Mansfield’s theatre, notices, ‘selfishness . . . more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all.’

  Any doubts which the young Jane might have felt about the goings-on in the Steventon barn were unlikely to have been expressed, and there is no reason to suppose that, if they were, any attention would have been paid to the opinion of such an insignificant member of the family.18 Any resistance to the expectation that all the young people would take their part in James’s plays would have been dismissed impatiently by Jane’s mother who regarded non-participation as idleness. But the young girl may have been supported – and, perhaps, influenced – by another woman who arrived in the neighbourhood when she was eight years old.

  Anne Lefroy, wife of the Rector in the nearby parish of Ashe, was twenty-five years older than Jane Austen, but she would be a close friend until her untimely death in a riding accident in 1804. That Jane admired this dynamic woman is evident from the poem which she wrote on the anniversary of Mrs Lefroy’s death, praising her ‘Genius, Taste & Tenderness of Soul’. Other members of the family testified to the importance of this friend in young Jane’s life. She was one of the older women who provided an example and a template for Jane as she grew and developed her own ideas: a model of what a woman could be and an example of what a woman could achieve in life.

  Mrs Lefroy was a forceful, active, popular lady; she was elegant and well-read with a particular love of poetry, but, unlike Mrs Austen, she was no enthusiast for amateur dramatics. In 1787, when asked by her friend, Lady Bolton, to take part in a theatrical party at Hackwood Park, she declined firmly, tempering her refusal with a tactful, witty piece of verse in which she asked:

  ‘Can I a Wife, a Mother, tread the Stage

  Burn with false fire & glow with mimic rage . . . ’19

  Her objection is similar to the one Edmund Bertram would make in Mansfield Park when he protests that acting requires ‘more exertion and confidence’20 than a lady could be supposed to have. Perhaps it was a point of view which Jane internalised and recalled many years later.

  Anne Lefroy presented an attractive role model for a bright young girl. Her letters conjure up a clever woman with strong, sometimes contradictory opinions. Conventionally pious, as befitted a clergyman’s wife, she was sure, when a French invasion threatened in 1803, that God would favour the religious British. But she could also be superstitious and had an interest in some of the odder claims of quack medicine. She was fond of animals, and once rescued a donkey from neighbours, claiming: ‘they really both starve & overwork him & I cannot bear he should be so ill used.’ But she could describe the human suffering of naval life with equanimity. ‘Charles Austen told me that Bob Simmons had behaved very well since his whipping which was uncommonly severe,’ she wrote in March 1802, adding cheerfully, ‘he had the honour to suffer in the presence of Prince Augustus who chose to stay upon deck and be a spectator of his punishment.’ 21

  Anne Lefroy held a great deal of power and influence, not only in her own family, but also in the wider community. However, she did not break the rules of decorum by engaging in trade or stepping down the social ladder as Dorothy’s Aunt Threlkeld had done. She gained her status rather by being the ideal gentlewoman. Although devoted to her family she was also very active in the parish. She worked among the poor, ran a Sunday and a weekday school and undertook the inoculation against smallpox of just about everyone she could get her hands on.

  Mrs Lefroy had, in effect, created a fulfilling career for herself out of the activities which were deemed proper for a virtuous lady and it was all based on a philosophy of ‘usefulness’ such as Hannah More’s. ‘[T]o be permitted to be of essential service to any fellow creature,’ she wrote, ‘appears to me the best blessing that can be bestowed upon us.’22

  In her activity and energy Mrs Lefroy was not unlike Mrs Austen, yet her dislike of acting and her love of literature indicate a degree of refinement, a capacity for abstract thought, which the young Jane may have found lacking in her mother. The discovery of such a friend may also have increased the emotional distance between Jane and her mother. This friendship, by providing her with a point of reference outside her own family, would have helped Jane to develop her own opinions. Love and Friendship – and the other early stories which are now collected together as Jane Austen’s Juvenilia – reveal a determination to think for herself which is remarkable in a teenage writer.

  Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth were alike in their close observation of their fellow men and women. Maybe it was a suspicion that she was being scrutinised and judged by her younger cousin which alienated Philly Walter when she first met her cousin Jane in July 1788. She much preferred fifteen-year-old Cassandra to twelve-year-old Jane. Cassandra, was ‘very pretty,’ but Jane was ‘not at all pretty & very prim, unlike a girl of twelve.’ A few days later, having spent more time in their company, she added: ‘Jane is whimsical and affected.’23

  Perhaps, up in the parlours of Penrith, the Miss Custs and the other ‘notables’ equally resented Dorothy’s critical stare. Or perhaps they detected in her a ‘sensibility too tremblingly alive’ to her own afflictions, and distrusted it.

  Jane was learning another very useful lesson
at this time. In the way of teenagers, she was testing the limits in her early stories, finding out just what it was allowable to mention. Oddly enough, quite a lot was allowable as she read out her work to the assembled Austen family. In the very opening lines of Love and Friendship, there is a reference to bastardy – ‘my mother was the natural daughter of a Scotch Peer by an Italian opera-girl’ – and, later in the story, the subject recurs when two cousins calmly explain that, ‘our mothers could neither of them exactly relate who were our fathers’. Confused identity was a device on which the plots of many novels turned, for it opened the possibilities of noble heritage and sudden legacies. Here, however, Jane adds her own twist, snatching away the glamour by making the probable fathers, ‘Philip Jones a Bricklayer’ and ‘Gregory Staves a Staymaker’.

  In Love and Friendship there are also sudden deaths with corpses ‘weltering in their blood’ and elsewhere in Jane’s early tales there are horrible injuries in man-traps and serious alcoholism (in Jack and Alice) and even cannibalism (in Henry and Eliza, when the heroine’s children become so hungry they gnaw off their mother’s fingers). Yet none of it is shocking, because it is all completely ridiculous.

  Humour, the young Jane was discovering, was a useful way of avoiding direct argument. It was very effective if one was surrounded by a large family and wished to make oneself heard without causing offence. Humour was both a weapon and a stalking-horse. Under its cover it was possible to say things which would have been unacceptable if they had been pronounced in a serious voice. Jane was learning the advantages of speaking obliquely, of not laying open the secrets of her heart, but instead expressing herself with caution and ambiguity.

  Six

  Ladies of the Rectory

  Dorothy’s delivery from the dull house in Penrith came suddenly and from an unexpected quarter. In October 1788 William Cookson – now reconciled to his parents and brother – at last married Miss Cowper. And the sixteen-year-old Dorothy was invited to make her home with them.

  She was delighted. As always at emotional moments, tears streamed from her eyes when the offer was made. She ‘cried and laughed alternately’ at the thought of living ‘in the country and with such friends.’1 It was as well she was pleased with the arrangement for, in truth, she probably had little choice. The family seems simply to have decided that it would be convenient.

  The trio left Penrith immediately after the wedding and so were rid of the ‘awful forms’ of receiving congratulatory visits. Dorothy found this a great relief, seeming to share in that bashfulness which Jane Austen allows brides in Emma. Dorothy was playing a third party in this marriage; it was a role she would repeat fourteen years later when her brother married. This was the first of two honeymoon journeys that Dorothy, the life-long spinster, would take.

  The country to which she now removed was very different from the mountainous terrain of Cumberland. Her uncle had been appointed rector of Forncett, a parish in Norfolk, about two hundred and fifty miles from Penrith. ‘The country about us,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘though not romantic or picturesque is very pleasing, the surface is tolerably varied, and we have great plenty of wood but a sad want of water.’2 There was a comfortable red brick rectory built in Queen Anne’s day, a Norman church and ‘farmers, who,’ Dorothy reported cautiously, ‘seem very decent kind of people.’3

  William Cookson had hesitated long over his decision to take orders and feared that he would make ‘but a very sorry divine’.4 But he seems to have been a conscientious parson when he first took up his living. ‘My uncle will I am sure do a great deal of good in the place’,5 wrote Dorothy soon after their arrival in the parish.

  For the next six years Dorothy’s closest companion would be Dorothy Cookson, and she would write, towards the end of their life together, ‘My Aunt is without exception the best-tempered woman I know and is extremely kind to me.’6 The influence of this calm, quiet, domestic woman is apparent in her life at this time. ‘Am I not daring?’7 exclaimed Dorothy on one occasion when she had — like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice — walked just three miles alone. Dorothy would later stride about on her own with great confidence but, during her Forncett years, she seems to have considered such independent behaviour to be almost as shocking as Miss Bingley and her sister do.

  Like Anne Lefroy, Mrs Cookson was a woman who took seriously the role of rector’s wife and seems to have been motivated by a wish to be ‘useful’. By the beginning of 1789 Dorothy was able to report that she and her aunt had now ‘visited most of the poor people in the parish’8. By the summer of that year Dorothy was running a school with nine scholars drawn from the labouring families in the area.

  Presiding over small charity schools such as the one Dorothy describes, where lessons were delivered between church services on a Sunday and ‘those who live near us come to me every Wednesday and Saturday evening’9, was considered a very proper undertaking for a gentlewoman. (In Emma Mrs Elton is proud of her sister’s involvement in such a project near Maple Grove10.) The purpose of these schools was limited, however; they were not intended to extend the horizons of the poor too far. ‘I only instruct them in reading and spelling,’ Dorothy explained, ‘and they get off prayers hymns and catechisms.’ The children were taught to read in order to be able to read the Bible and other religious material. They were not taught to write; it was not necessary for them to express their own ideas.

  Jane Austen’s friend, Anne Lefroy, who was an enthusiastic educator of the poor, summed up the conservative ethos of these church schools. ‘My great object,’ she wrote, ‘is to make them [her pupils] understand their duty & to convince them it is both their interest & their happiness to follow the precepts of that most excellent religion in the principles of which I endeavour to instruct them.’11

  Apart from her charity work it was a quiet life at Forncett, but it suited Dorothy. ‘I have two kind friends,’ she told Jane Pollard, ‘with whom I live in retirement . . .  I have leisure to read; work; walk and do what I please.’ It sounds like an idyll, but there was already a small cloud on the horizon, a threat to all that wonderful freedom. Dorothy continued: ‘We look forward to the coming of our little relation with anxious expectation. I hope to be a good nurse . . . ’12

  Down in the Hampshire rectory, when Jane was a teenager, Mr Austen was more occupied with supplementing his own income by teaching the sons of gentlemen than doing ‘a great deal of good’ to his impoverished parishioners. Interest here focused less on charity and more on entertainment. For the boys there was hunting; for Jane and Cassandra there was dancing at the monthly assemblies in Basingstoke town hall and private parties among their neighbours such as the Dewars of Enham House (where Jane probably made her first entry into society in the Autumn of 1792).

  Cousin Eliza wrote of Cassandra: ‘I hear her sister & herself are two of the prettiest girls in England,’13 and ‘I hear they [Jane and Cassandra] are perfect Beauties & of course gain “hearts by dozens”’14. Though she does not say where she has heard either report, and it has to be admitted that Eliza tended to gush.

  In the neighbouring parish of Ashe, Mrs Lefroy had probably already established her school for the poor by the time Jane was in her teens, but there is no evidence that Jane or Cassandra joined in her schemes, or were inspired to emulate her example in their own village.15 Although she admired her older friend – and would, over the years, take a proper ladylike interest in charity – Jane did not seek meaning for her life in the kind of ‘usefulness’ that earned Anne Lefroy her power and status in the local community.

  It is likely that both Jane and Dorothy, intelligent young women with their formal schooling behind them, were looking at this age for a sense of purpose in their lives. And this could be a tortuous quest for a genteel Georgian woman. Denied higher education and a career, unable even to travel on her own, what could a well-brought-up young lady do?

  The journal of nineteen-year-old Hannah Gurney reveals how difficult it was for a Georgian girl to find s
omething worthwhile to do with her life, something which she was good at and to which she could devote her energies. In 1806 Hannah described the many ambitions which she had already gone through as she tried out the limited options open to a woman confined to the home, and discovered, either that she had no talent for them, or the limitations of solitary study prevented her from making progress. She had begun with a love of riding and then had wished to be regarded as learned – ‘and for this purpose how many books did I devour’. Next it was mathematics ‘and many were the castles which I built upon the fame which I expected to acquire by discoveries in this science . . .  This passion retired at the entrance of that for painting . . .  how towering were my imaginations this way; what structures, with the help of fancy, hope and ambition, I built at this period: they have vanished, and three or four wearied pieces of canvass remain to be a sorry spectacle of the result of my folly. Ambition,’ concluded Hannah, ‘ . . . still hovers about me, marking me for its prey’.16

  Jane Austen’s ambitions were more focused than poor Miss Gurney’s; or else she was more fortunate in discovering her true talent while she was still very young. From a remarkably early age she seems to have found satisfaction in writing. Here is one of those contradictions which mark the lives of Jane and Dorothy. While the ‘sensitive’ Dorothy turned outward to serve the community, the ‘sensible’ Jane retreated into an inward, imaginative life.

  Jane was honing her skills and finding ways of expressing her ideas, while still using humour to attack anything of which she disapproved. Courtship and weddings (subjects which would be central to her mature work) were beginning to interest the observant young writer, for her brothers were beginning to find their marriage partners. This seems to have occasioned an error of judgement on Jane’s part which was to have far-reaching consequences.