Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  Dorothy had chosen a simpler way of life, because it was the means of being with the man she loved. Poverty made her independent of her relations, but Jane felt both dependent and poor.

  She had little patience with her mother’s illnesses. ‘My mother’s spirits are not affected by her complication of disorders . . .  nor are you to suppose that these maladies are often thought of,’21 she wrote on 24th December; but, since her previous letter had contained a list of the multitude of colourful disorders Mrs Austen had recently thought of – unsettled bowels, asthma, dropsy, water in her chest and liver disorder – the remark was almost certainly ironic.

  ‘She does not like the cold weather, but that we cannot help,’22 Jane reported briskly in the same letter. A few weeks later, as a new complaint was added to the asthma, dropsy etc: ‘She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present; but I have not much compassion for cold in the head without fever or sore throat.’23

  Poor Mrs Austen! A writer longing to return to her work does not make the most sympathetic nurse. A woman who thought less and responded from the heart would have been, not only a more satisfactory carer, but a more satisfactory daughter as well. Sometimes that coldness and reserve which made Jane draw back from intimacy with the pleasant Miss Mapletons seems to have operated even within her own family; empathy for others’ suffering was not one of her strengths.

  There were dances that winter. ‘We are to kill a pig soon. There is to be a ball at Basingstoke next Thursday,’24 ran one line as her thoughts tumbled into her letter. Her attitude to these balls was a little equivocal. One, at Manydown, which she expected to be ‘stupid’ exceeded her expectations and she was pleased to find herself ‘capable of dancing so much and with so much satisfaction as I did.’25

  She did not say why she was surprised. Maybe she was beginning to feel – now that she was approaching twenty-three – that she was getting too old to be enthusiastic about balls, that she had at least grown up over the last seven years and no longer suffered under ‘the insatiable appetite’26 for dancing which she ascribed to girls of fifteen in Sense and Sensibility.

  She was certainly beginning to be impatient with the labour of dressing well, a labour which was considered the duty of every young lady still in search of a husband. ‘I cannot determine what to do about my new Gown,’ she wrote in the same letter. ‘I wish such things were to be bought ready-made.’ Her wish would not become a reality for another century, but she found other ways of saving time and effort. ‘I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home,’ she wrote in December – just two weeks before her twenty-third birthday – ‘and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing . . . ’

  Matrons and women past marriageable age generally wore caps; young girls went bare-headed indoors, their hair usually elaborately curled. It is likely that Jane’s caps were intended for wear at a time when only family would see her, but their creation was a first concession to advancing age. Perhaps this sense of increased maturity gave her new confidence. ‘I enjoyed the hard black frosts of last week very much, and one day while they lasted,’ she reported proudly to Cassandra, ‘walked to Deane by myself – I do not know that I ever did such a thing in my life before.’27 It was probably very refreshing to get out of the house.

  While Cassandra was away from home, there can have been little opportunity to write. Another distraction was the arrival of James and Mary’s first baby in November 179828 ; and then, soon after Cassandra returned home to take over the housekeeping keys and the laudanum bottle, Edward and some of his family arrived to take Jane and her mother to Bath. The wealthy, fortunate Edward had been unwell of late, and his sister’s sympathy was mixed with a large helping of sarcasm. ‘Poor Edward!’ she commented. ‘It is very hard that he who has everything else in the World that he can wish for, should not have good health too.’ She did go on to concede that ‘I know no one more deserving of happiness without alloy than Edward is.’29 But she could never quite forget those inequalities of fortune.

  She seems to have enjoyed Bath on this occasion. A visit paid with Edward and Elizabeth would have involved good lodgings and the best entertainments. She may have used the visit to gather background details for the Bath episodes in Susan, the novel on which she was now engaged (and which would eventually become Northanger Abbey). She may even have managed to get some writing done during the visit since she had the luxury of a room of her own in their lodgings.

  Even so, she was soon missing the peace of her dressing room. ‘I feel tolerably secure of our getting away next week,’ she wrote on 11th June, betraying the desire for a return that is nearly always detectable in her letters when she was away from home, ‘tho it is certainly possible that we may remain till Thursday the 27th.’30

  She was also impatient with the idea of other visits which were being suggested for the coming months. ‘I wonder what we shall do with all our intended visits this summer?’ she wrote. ‘I should like to make a compromise with Adlestrop, Harden and Bookham that Martha’s spending the summer at Steventon should be considered as our respective visits to them all.’31

  Jane seems nearly always to have resented journeys and visits and to have preferred being left peacefully at home, where it was possible to escape to the manuscripts in her dressing room. And Martha Lloyd was one of the few friends whose company seemed to give her pleasure. ‘I love Martha better than ever,’32 she wrote, in a rare expression of decided, straightforward affection. A long visit from Martha would be a positive pleasure; and this was a friendship which would deepen over the years. But there was already a rift opening between the Austen girls and Martha’s sister, Mary, who was now James’s wife. ‘I am heartily glad that You have escaped any share in the Impurities of Deane,’ Jane remarked at the beginning of this letter – apparently congratulating Cassandra on having avoided a visit to James and Mary.

  Tensions had been building since James’s second marriage and one cause of ill feeling may have been Mary’s resentment of her husband’s family: a feeling that he paid them too much attention. Back in October 1798 Jane had remarked, ‘James seems to have taken to his old trick of coming to Steventon inspite of Mary’s reproaches.’33

  A wife ill-disposed towards her husband’s relations did not bode well for Jane’s future.

  Eighteen

  Homecoming and Exile

  On May Day 1799 Dorothy and William Wordsworth arrived in England, having spent two months walking back through Germany. They were very glad to be on English soil once more. They had found ‘living in Germany, with the enjoyment of any tolerable advantages, much more expensive than we expected.’1They had no money and no better prospect of earning any than when they set off. ‘My progress in German considered with reference to literary emolument is not even as dust in the balance’,2 reported William.

  They were also homeless but, fortunately, they had good friends. Mary Hutchinson welcomed them as warmly to her home at Sockburn as they had welcomed her to Racedown, and it was on this farm where Mary was living with brothers Tom and George, and sisters Sara and Joanna, that William and Dorothy passed most of the rest of the year.

  Coleridge did not return to England until July – despite the fact that his infant son Berkley had died in February. Poor Sarah, grieving on her own at Stowey, heartbroken and exhausted with nursing, had been longing and pleading for his return. Coleridge’s attempt to distance himself from this tragedy, his deliberate procrastination over going home and his reluctance to witness his wife’s grief certainly did not reflect well upon the man who claimed to value an affectionate heart above all else. But Dorothy does not seem to have been surprised by his behaviour.

  Even after his return from Germany Coleridge did not remain long with his sadly diminished family. By the end of October he and his friend, the publisher Cottle, were in Sockburn with the Wordsworths and Hutchinsons. On 27th October
Coleridge, Cottle and Wordsworth set off from Sockburn for a walking-tour of the Lake District. And, on this walk, William made a discovery. On 8th November he wrote to Dorothy, ‘There is a small house at Grasmere empty which perhaps we may take, and purchase furniture but of this we will speak.’3 This small house was the one that is now known as Dove Cottage. William and Dorothy moved into it in December 1799.

  By the end of 1800 Coleridge had moved himself and his family north to be near the Wordsworths, occupying a part of the large Greta Hall in Keswick – just thirteen miles from Grasmere. The Concern was re-established; and Dorothy was settled in the house that was to be more completely her home than any other.

  Soon after Dorothy achieved this longed-for home, Jane found herself an exile, cast out from Steventon Rectory, the only home she had ever known.

  It seems likely that those visits to Adlestrop, Harden and Bookham had been forced upon her, so her working life would have been sadly disrupted during the summer of 1799. However, she had not been called upon to pay another, stranger visit.

  In August Jane’s wealthy aunt, Mrs Leigh-Perrot (wife of Mrs Austen’s brother), ‘a ladylike little old woman’ who was ‘not at all a stupid person’4, was accused of shoplifting in Bath.5 Though her accusers probably expected to be bought off, she staunchly maintained her innocence and allowed the law to take its course. She spent the following seven months confined in the jailer’s house at Ilchester and in March 1800 stood trial at Taunton Castle, facing a charge which could have carried a sentence of deportation. But she was, to the great rejoicing of her family, found innocent.6

  During Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s imprisonment her sister-in-law, Mrs Austen, wrote very kindly offering the services of either of her daughters if Mrs Leigh-Perrot would like some company in jail, or moral support at the trial. Jane was never very fond of her aunt, but she was probably grateful to that lady for declining Mrs Austen’s generous offer. ‘[T]o have two Young Creatures gazed at in a public Court would cut one to the very heart,’7 wrote Mrs Leigh-Perrot in explanation of her refusal.

  An unmarried daughter’s hold on her own time was extremely fragile. By comparing the situations of Jane and Dorothy at this point in their lives, it appears that what Dorothy had achieved in her escape from Forncett was, in effect, adulthood.

  Jane had very little control over her own life. She could be made use of in any crisis, transported against her wishes to socialise at Adlestrop or Bookham, or sent, just as easily, to endure the squalor of Ilchester jail. As she approached her twenty-fifth birthday, she was still in the position of a child, provided with her keep and pocket money, but taking no part in family decisions, even those which concerned her most closely.

  In December 1800, while she was staying with her friend Martha at Ibthorpe, and Cassandra was once more paying a long visit to Edward’s family at Godmersham, their parents took the momentous decision to move from Steventon, give up the rectory, and settle in Bath. Jane knew nothing of such a plan. Just weeks before announcing their decision, Mr and Mrs Austen were buying furniture for their home and making improvements to their grounds. ‘Our improvements have advanced very well;’8 Jane wrote on 25th October, and on 8th November she reported: ‘The Tables are come, & give general contentment . . . ’9 And then, on 20th November, eleven days after a great storm had felled three elm trees in the rectory grounds, the improvement plans were still developing. ‘A new plan has been suggested concerning the plantation of the new inclosure . . . ’10

  It seems unlikely that Mr and Mrs Austen would have been pursuing these schemes and spending money on a home which they were considering giving up. So their decision to move was probably taken suddenly. That they should have failed to take either of their adult daughters into their confidence is astounding. It says a great deal about Mrs Austen’s attitude towards Jane and Cassandra – the little importance she placed upon them as young women. And such a lack of respect offers a more credible explanation for Jane’s coldness towards her than the child-care arrangements she made.

  When Jane returned from Ibthorpe, in December, she was immediately greeted with the news – and in the most unfeeling way. Mrs Austen met her daughter in the hall with the bald statement, ‘ . . . it is all settled we have decided to leave Steventon . . . and go to Bath.’11

  ‘The resolution to leave Steventon took all their relations by surprise,’ Jane’s great-niece reported, ‘and as there did not seem any sufficient reason for it in the health of either, some secret motive was suspected.’12

  Mr and Mrs Leigh-Perrot believed that the secret motive might be a growing attachment between Jane and neighbour, William Digweed, but none of the closer family gave credit to this idea, for there was no particular reason why such an attachment – if it existed – should be disrupted. It is more likely that other family members had persuaded Mr and Mrs Austen into the removal during their daughters’ absence. This seems to have been what Jane suspected.

  There are no surviving letters from Jane to Cassandra between the visit to Ibthorpe and January of the following year – although Cassandra was still away at Godmersham during that time. Letters destroyed by Cassandra may well have included criticism of James and Mary, and the accusation that they had persuaded Mr and Mrs Austen to make a move which they had not been planning a few weeks earlier.

  Jane’s eldest brother and his wife were to benefit considerably from Mr Austen’s retirement: they would take over the Steventon house and the curacy of the parish. As the arrangements for the transfer carried on, Jane definitely detected inordinate greed in their actions. ‘My father’s old ministers are already deserting him to pay court to his son;’ she wrote ironically, turning this passing on of a country rectory into a state coup and so implying intrigue and dark plotting: ‘the brown Mare, which as well as the black was to devolve on James at our removal, has not had patience to wait for that, & has settled herself even now at Deane . . . & everything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner.’13

  ‘My Aunt was very sorry to leave her native home,’ recalled Jane’s niece Caroline in a letter to James Edward Austen-Leigh when he was gathering material for his memoir. ‘ . . . My mother who was present said my Aunt Jane was greatly distressed – all things were done in a hurry by Mr Austen & of course this is not a fact to be written and printed – but you have authority for saying she did mind it – if you think it worth while.’14

  The fact that Mary (Caroline’s mother) was present when the retirement was announced would have been an extra aggravation. It cannot have pleased Jane to find that her sister-in-law was privy to a plan of which she knew nothing. It may well have seemed that the malevolent power of the married woman over her spinster sisters-in-law – a power which she had imagined in her fiction – was becoming a reality in her life.

  It is clear from Caroline’s letter, not only that Jane was greatly upset by the news, but also that her family felt her reaction should be covered up in the interests of that peaceableness and solidarity on which they wished all their interactions to be founded. Decades later, when Austen-Leigh was composing his memoir, this subject still had to be avoided. Maybe that is not surprising, for the subject does raise questions about the darker aspects of family life. Jane’s distress on hearing of the move may not have been caused entirely by grief at losing her home. The change also impacted on her in another way: it meant that her long-term future was even less secure than it had seemed to be.

  Though, in the early months of 1801, Mr Austen did ‘all in his power to encrease (sic) his Income . . . ’, the move to Bath could not help but impoverish him. He must now pay two curates to perform his duties at Steventon and Deane. Even at the very lowest rates of pay (similar to the miserable income of £50 a year which Mrs Jennings foresees Edward and Lucy ‘setting down on’ in Sense and Sensibility) that would cost £100 a year. The family would also lose their rent-free rectory and be obliged to pay for very expensive accommodation in Bath. The modest town-house i
n which they finally settled in May 1801 cost £150 a year. Comparing this figure – which was advertised as a ‘very low’ rent in the Bath Chronicle 15– with the £24 that the Wordsworths paid for a great mansion in parkland at Alfoxton demonstrates the extremely high cost of living in a fashionable resort town. Food, brought in from the countryside, would have been relatively expensive too, particularly to the Austens who had been used to being almost self-sufficient on their glebe lands.

  It was, in real terms, a severe cut in the family income. Mr Austen would receive nearly £600 a year after the move, but the new expenses he was incurring would eat up almost half that money. Jane would not have been so narrow minded (or illiberal as she would have put it herself) as to deny her father’s claim to retirement. But the decision to move would have made clear to her that there would definitely be no money set aside to settle on her or Cassandra. Now he had set his sons up in the world and given them the best start in life he could manage, Mr Austen considered his duty to his family to be over.

  After all, his retirement need not have entailed a costly change of abode; he could have hired curates and continued to live in the rectory. Perhaps the move was all for the sake of Mrs Austen’s health, which might have been pure hypochondria, since her relations did not consider her ill enough to necessitate a residence in Bath. Or perhaps it was all done to provide James and his wife with a better income and a larger home. If Mary resented her husband’s frequent visits to his family, perhaps she wished to get them out of the way.