Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  It is possible that Mr Austen determined upon seeking a publisher himself, but it is also possible that he yielded to the persuasions of other friends or members of the family – or pressure from Jane herself. This may have been the end to which she had been working over the last ten months of intense effort.

  The letter that Mr Austen wrote is decidedly lacklustre. He does not sound enthusiastic about the book himself; he might well have been acting on someone else’s wishes rather than his own. ‘I have in my possession,’ he wrote, ‘a manuscript novel, comprised in three Vols. About the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina.’ There is nothing there likely to make any publisher wish to read it. He continued though with a little flattery, such as he used on patrons he hoped would advance his sons’ careers, writing, ‘as I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make it’s first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you.’ He then went on to ask what would be the cost of publishing the book at the author’s expense and how much Cadell would pay for it, if he liked it well enough to buy it outright.

  These two suggestions reflect alternative ways of publishing at the time. Either a publisher bought the copyright of a work and took the profits from it, or the author invested his or her own capital in the venture and took the proceeds of sales.

  Unsurprisingly, Mr Austen’s brief missive failed to persuade Cadell to consider either option. ‘Declined by return of post’ was written across the top of the letter. Thomas Cadell did not even look at the manuscript. It was the letter that failed, not the book, but Mr Austen does not seem to have made any approach to other publishers.

  This one short, ineffectual letter is often considered as evidence that Mr Austen was supportive of his younger daughter’s work, but it was a limited kind of support which produced no more effort to find a publisher for First Impressions, and no attempt to sell the two books which followed rapidly as Jane remained dedicated to the hard work of writing. His query about the cost of publishing at ‘the author’s risk’ does suggest he may have considered – or been persuaded to consider – putting forward money for publication, but this offer never became more concrete.

  This single attempt to promote the career of his brilliant daughter pales into insignificance when set against the time and effort Mr Austen devoted to forwarding the fortunes of his sons. In 1794 his attempts simply to get Frank moved from one ship to another involved canvassing the interest of Warren Hastings, Admiral Sir Edmund Affleck and Mr Pybus (a Lord of the Admiralty).25 Four years later he and his sons were still pestering potential patrons – ‘The Lords of the Admiralty will have enough of our applications,’ quipped Jane.26

  Mr Austen was certainly not unusual in considering his sons’ careers to be more important than his daughter’s, and he did not actively discourage Jane from writing. But it was not unknown for aspiring female authors to be more actively encouraged by their fathers at this time. There is evidence that Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie and Susan Ferrier all received more paternal support than Jane did.

  Although there were no more approaches to publishers, Jane’s next move was that of a dedicated, professional writer: she took out the manuscript of Elinor and Marianne and began to rewrite it, converting it from an epistolary novel into a straightforward narrative. Again there were distractions as she tried to work. In November Jane, Cassandra and their mother accompanied their aunt and uncle Leigh-Perrot to Bath and stayed for a month. This visit – which seems to have been Jane’s first experience of a town she was to come to thoroughly dislike – was made for the sake of her mother’s health.

  Though Mrs Austen’s early married life had been characterised by hard work and energy with a home, a farm and a school of boys to oversee, now that she had less to think about, she seems to have become rather preoccupied with her own health, an interest which would sometimes irritate her younger daughter. Jane was impatient with anything approaching hypochondria; she would hold the subject up to merciless ridicule in her last, unfinished novel, Sanditon, even as the illness that would end her own life was taking hold. So Mrs Austen’s new hobby may well have been another cause of friction between mother and daughter – particularly when it took Jane away from the peace of the Steventon dressing room and her work.

  Soon after the ladies returned to the rectory there was the distraction of another family engagement. Cousin Henry, having broken his previous engagement to Mary Pearson, had now formed a new attachment. His fiancée – whom he married on the last day of 1797 – was none other than his cousin, the glamorous widow, Eliza de Feuillide.

  Jean-François de Feuillide was now dead, having fallen foul of the new revolutionary government of France. His wife described him in one letter as ‘a strong Aristocrate or Royalist in his Heart’.27 There is an echo here of Dorothy’s description of herself: ‘I own I am too much of an aristocrate or what you please to call me . . . ’. It seems that, in this Age of Revolution, the term ‘aristocrate’ was used, not just to refer to titled folk, but also as a kind of shorthand to indicate allegiance.

  Sometime in 1793 de Feuillide was arrested for an attempt to save the Marquis de Marboeuf from execution and, early in 1794, he himself perished on the guillotine. These events would, of course, have provided Jane Austen’s personal experience of the French Revolution, in marked contrast to the account that would have been mediated to Dorothy through the observations of her brother.

  Eliza – who had remained in England since the birth of her son28 – recovered rapidly from any grief she felt at her husband’s death, and showed every sign of enjoying her widowhood. She was not prepared to admit, even now, that she might marry for love. ‘[I]ndependence and the homage of half a dozen are preferable to subjection and the attachment of a single individual’ she had written earlier that year; and Henry’s greatest attractions lay in his ‘steady attachment’ and his readiness to let her have her own way.29 However, Eliza was to prove a much more congenial and kindly sister-in-law to Jane than James’s bride.

  With the distraction of the wedding out of the way, Jane continued with her task of turning Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility. The translation from epistolary form to third person narrative would have been hard, often tedious, work, a honing of her craft much more than an exercise of the imagination. What was the impetus for such a labour?

  The tale had already reached as wide an audience as she could expect without the manuscript being circulated as a printed book. There would have been little satisfaction in reading it again – even in a revised form – to the same circle of family and friends. It is difficult to see what her purpose can have been if she was not aiming for publication.

  Fifteen

  A Small Revolution

  Like Jane’s writing, Dorothy’s study of Ariosto was constantly interrupted. The cold winter of 1796/97, which Jane spent ensconced in her dressing room conjuring into being Lizzy Bennet and Mr Darcy, produced money worries at Racedown.

  Uncle Richard Wordsworth – who had financed William’s studies at Cambridge – had died in 1794; but the debt of about £400 was still outstanding and now his son, Robinson Wordsworth, was – not unreasonably – asking that at least some of it should be repaid. Up in Cumberland gossiping folk were saying that young William Wordsworth had ‘used his Uncle’s children very ill.’ Dorothy and William, unable to deny the justice of their cousin’s claims, were upset.

  ‘We are very anxious to know what you have done respecting Robinson Wordsworth’s claims upon us’1, wrote Dorothy to their lawyer brother, Richard. Poor Richard! William and Dorothy always looked to him to sort out legal and financial problems. Perhaps, on this occasion, they hoped he might put up some money. But Richard probably felt that William should make more effort to earn something for himself.

  There were, however, visitors to distract Dorothy. At Racedown she first experienced the long-anticipated pleasure of welcoming friends to a home of her own. Mary Hutchinson came in the spring of 1797. She and Dorothy worked ha
ppily together, making fair copies of the poems William was now composing and sewing shirts for both William and Richard.

  If his brother and sister were a little unreasonable in their demands on him, Richard also seems to have expected unpaid labour from Dorothy, and his attitude towards the construction of these shirts was unhelpfully cavalier. His answer to the question of how long they should be was ‘a tolerable length’ and when the first four shirts proved too tight around the neck, Dorothy wrote testily, ‘It is a great pity you did not send me an accurate measure.’ Relations with this eldest brother were never easy.

  Mary Hutchinson left Racedown on 5th June 1797 and the following day produced a visitor who put shirts and money troubles – and pretty much everything else – out of Dorothy’s head.

  Coleridge arrived.2

  ‘You had great loss in not seeing Coleridge,’ Dorothy enthused in a letter to Mary Hutchinson. ‘He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind and body.’ She described him as ‘pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair . . . ’ But, like Maria and Julia Bertram of Mansfield Park who think Henry Crawford plain at a first meeting only to be won over by his charming ways, Dorothy soon did not notice Coleridge’s looks. ‘[I]f you hear him speak for five minutes,’ she assured Mary, ‘you think no more of them.’3

  Dorothy knew before she met Coleridge that he was a married man and there was never any wavering in her devotion to her brother. She would certainly not have said that she was in love with her new acquaintance. But she would also have rejected such commonplace words as respect or esteem. ‘Eager in everything’, Dorothy immediately gave this charismatic man a unique place in her affections. It was a dangerous thing to do. Everybody who loved Coleridge was, sooner or later, hurt by him.

  The reason why there was no conflict in her feelings for her new friend and her brother was because they too were, for a while at least, infatuated with each other. Wordsworth and Coleridge – who had met, briefly, before – read their work to each other and talked. And Dorothy talked with them.

  Coleridge had intended to stay at Racedown for only ten days, but it was not until the beginning of July that he returned to his home at Nether Stowey (about thirty-five miles away, in Somerset), and when he did return he took his new friends with him. None of them could bear the thought of parting, and Dorothy seems to have had no hesitation in leaving little Basil behind with the maid, Peggy. Her intoxication with Coleridge’s company entirely overcame her determination to take all the care of the child upon herself.

  Coleridge’s little cottage on Lime Street in Nether Stowey, with its cramped parlour, three small bedrooms and an open drain running within yards of the front door, was a world away from the gracious mansion that had been the Wordsworths’ home for the last year and a half. The place did not dampen their spirits – though it did perhaps drive them out into the fresh air as much as possible. Leaving behind his wife, Sarah, and nine-month-old son, Hartley, Coleridge took Dorothy and William rambling for hours – days – in the Somerset countryside which delighted them all. Dorothy wrote to her friends of, ‘sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland . . . ’4

  They walked and continued to talk. They talked about philosophy and poetry, they talked about the meaning of life and how to change the world. Dorothy was now joining in a conversation far removed from the usual chit-chat that genteel women shared with their men-folk in drawing-room and ballroom. This was that delightful sharing of thoughts without fear of ridicule or censure, which her ‘elopement’ had made possible.

  It would take a whole book to summarise all that might have been discussed during those walks in Somerset; the meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth laid the foundations of English Romantic Poetry as they both ‘sought to define what would be for them the most appropriate field of endeavour.’5 The two men may well have talked about events in France, for they would both, later, date their disenchantment with political radicalism to about this time. They certainly discussed the work of the philosophers Coleridge was reading: David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, George Berkeley and others. Gradually, William’s faith in political revolution was replaced by an almost mystical belief that ‘love of Nature . . . must lead both to a perception of the harmony of all things and to acceptance “of human suffering or of human joy”’.6

  In this new way of looking at the world deep feeling – sensibility – was of paramount importance. Summing up the ideas formulated at this time William would explain that, ‘the feeling therein developed [i.e. in his poems] gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.’7 But feeling was not an end in itself: ‘For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings’. So ‘our feelings will be connected with important subjects’, and this would have a profoundly moral influence.

  It was a deep, complicated, exciting discussion, a welcome relief from housework and childcare! It must have been exhilarating for Dorothy, but we can only know the ideas distilled from it; the conversation itself is lost. We cannot know whether Dorothy merely listened, or whether she contributed.

  Dorothy never returned to Racedown. By mid-July the Wordsworths had moved themselves, Basil, and Peggy, into Somerset. Their ‘principal inducement was Coleridge’s society’. And, though they had begun with ‘some dreams of happiness in a little cottage’, the house they took was no cottage; it was even larger than Racedown Lodge. ‘Here we are in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer around us,’8 Dorothy announced to Mary Hutchinson on 14th August 1797 – as if she had just woken up to find the move accomplished.

  Alfoxton House, about three miles from Nether Stowey, had been discovered by William and Dorothy on one of their walks. Built in the early eighteenth century, it had nine bedrooms, several living rooms and the full complement of kitchens, cellars, attics, stables and pleasure grounds required of a true gentleman’s residence.

  Three adults and a child would barely have filled a corner of it. During their life there, Dorothy would write of gathering firewood in the neighbouring woods, evoking an odd picture of her and William returning to the grandeur of Alfoxton House to light a makeshift fire of twigs and dead branches in an elegant drawing-room fireplace.9 They can have done little more than set up camp in the house; their lives would have failed to fill the many empty rooms; there would have been unopened doors ranked along corridors, and voices must have echoed in the vastness of the place.

  The rent was £23 a year, a price they certainly could not afford, but this seems to have been the only house available to rent. The Wordsworths loved it and, of course, they urgently needed to be near Coleridge.

  The creative result of their year’s stay at Alfoxton would be impressive. This extraordinary alliance (which Coleridge would describe as: ‘tho we were three persons, it was but one God’10) was the beginning of Dorothy’s journal writing and produced, from the two men, the ground-breaking volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads. But the Wordsworths’ decision to move into Somerset cannot have seemed wise to their family and more prudent friends.

  Brother Richard must have been horrified by their abandoning a rent-free home for one which would absorb half their income for the coming year. Their cousin, Robinson Wordsworth – still waiting for his money to be repaid – would have been unlikely to accept the necessity of their occupying a vast mansion in glorious countryside while he struggled to find enough money on which to marry.

  In this triangular love-affair – the ‘Concern’ as they called themselves – feelings were considered to be all important. A few years later Coleridge would describe the trio of himself, Wordsworth and Dorothy as having ‘seen a great deal of what is called the World, & yet have formed a deep conviction that all is contemptible that does not spring immediately out of an affectionate Heart.’ 11 But Dorothy�
��s affection, though it endowed her with an extraordinary capacity for self-sacrifice, seems to have had its blind-spots. At this time it certainly did not include poor Robinson Wordsworth – nor Sarah Coleridge.

  Just as Marianne Dashwood is contemptuous and inconsiderate towards the dull, kindly Mrs Jennings because she believes her to lack sensibility, so Dorothy could be dismissive of those she believed did not share her own depth of feeling. Coleridge’s wife, Sarah, did not win Dorothy’s approval or affection; she believed her to be lacking in sensibility. Sarah was excluded from their walks and discussions, but she was an interesting character who would play a significant role in Dorothy’s life. It was a mistake to underestimate her – as Dorothy consistently did.

  Just a few years earlier it had been Sarah tramping about the countryside with Coleridge having interesting conversations. Together with her sister Edith and Coleridge’s friend Robert Southey, they had – during those shockingly unchaperoned excursions – planned nothing short of Utopia. They meant to found an ideal society in America where about twelve men and twelve women would live a simple rural life, holding all property in common, all joining in the cultivation of the soil, all studying and educating their children.