Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  Her moments of closeness to William became more and more precious to Dorothy as the wedding approached, but, if William needed encouragement to pursue the affair, she was prepared to give it. When he made trips to meet again with Mary (on his own) during the Spring of 1802, Dorothy seems to have sent him off on his mission. On 14th February she remarked with pride, ‘off he went in his blue Spenser and a pair of new pantaloons fresh from London.’ She was clearly pleased that he was looking his best, but William was either reluctant or nervous. ‘He turned back when he had got as far as Frank’s to ask if he had got his letters safe, then for some apples – then fairly off.’

  The letters which were now coming from Annette were a worry and at some point it was decided that Dorothy and William would travel to France to see her and Caroline to warn her of the impending marriage, and to arrange to pay some money for Caroline’s maintenance. The trip was made in the summer of that year. The idea that William might marry Annette – now that the short-lived peace with France made such a thing possible – does not seem to have been seriously considered. It is easy to see why Dorothy would prefer a union with her old friend – a friend who had proved she could fit easily and comfortably into their existing life – to an unknown French woman.

  Dorothy might have seen the wedding as necessary, but her emotions became more volatile as it drew near. On 13th April when William returned from another visit to Mary (during which the date of the wedding seems to have been decided) Dorothy greeted him rapturously but, the next day: ‘I was ill out of spirits – disheartened.’

  However, William had brought a present for her: a poem he had written on his journey. Among All Lovely Things my Love had been recalled a real act of love he had performed for Dorothy in Somerset, several years earlier – one of those delicate little ‘attentions to [her] wishes’, that had made her love him so much. Knowing that she had never seen a glow-worm, he brought one home and left it in the garden for her to find. (See Appendix 3 for the full text of this poem.)

  The poem itself was a gift to Dorothy now: a reminder of their times together, and his care for her happiness, a reassurance that he still loved and needed her. The next day Dorothy repeated the poem to herself as she walked, as if it were a charm to ward off anxiety about the future. But a few days later she made a copy of this poem to send to the Hutchinson family, and in this copy of the poem the name of the beloved woman was changed. It was no longer Emma (the name William habitually gave to his sister in his poetry). It was Mary.7

  It is possible that William himself was callous enough to make the alteration – but this would not be consistent with the other evidence of his consideration and tenderness towards Dorothy at this time. It seems more likely that, having taken pleasure in the shared memory, Dorothy felt able to pass on the gift to William’s other love. A strange little act of self-sacrifice.

  On 16th April Dorothy wrote to Mary and called her ‘sister’ for the first time. ‘[D]o not make loving us your business,’ she wrote, ‘but let your love of us make up the spirit of all the business you have.’ William seems to have convinced her that she would be a part of this new alliance, and she implies in her letter that Mary will not only marry William, she will also marry Dorothy. The two cannot be separated.

  It appears to be a strange marriage to us. However, Amanda Vickery’s research and Mary Wollstonecraft’s commentary show that it was far from unusual for an unmarried sister to have to be incorporated somehow into a Georgian marriage. The triangular household established by the Wordsworths was kinder, more generous-hearted, than many, but in it Dorothy was to find her feelings checked and restrained as never before. It would produce its own unique suffering.

  Down in Bath, Jane Austen was also thinking about marriage in 1802, and in December of that year, prudence and restraint led her into great danger.

  Depressed, forced to look upon herself not as an aspiring author, but as a woman launched unsuccessfully on the marriage market, it is perhaps a measure of her despair and low self-esteem that she overcame the girlish imperative of ‘Do anything rather that marry without affection’, which she had put into the mouth of the highly principled Miss Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. Somehow, that year, she made herself believe that gratitude was a sufficient foundation for marriage. She had become used to being ‘thwarted’, she had learned to stifle her fantasies as Rousseau recommended and finally her belief that individual needs and feelings should give way to the wider interests of family brought her to a humiliating decision.

  In December of 1802, Jane and Cassandra went from Bath to stay with their old friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg at Manydown Park in Hampshire. This house – which, sadly, was demolished in 1965 – was an old-fashioned place with a park, an Elizabethan wing, panelled parlours, a sweeping staircase and at least one room grand enough to hold a ball, for Jane had danced there in a large party in 1796. It seems to have been a warm, comfortable place that was pleasant to be in; a later letter describes it as a house ‘in which one is tolerably independent of the weather’.8 It was a familiar place too: only five miles from Steventon, it would have aroused a sense of home and belonging.

  On the evening of 2nd December, Jane discovered that this could indeed be her home if she chose. She could escape from Bath for good. Harris Bigg Wither, the brother of Catherine and Alethea, and heir to the entire Manydown estate, asked her to be his wife. She accepted.

  There was to be an end to her Bath life: no more ‘stupid’ card parties, no more painful parading at balls, no more anxiety about her future. She was to live in the country; she was to be rich and independent; she was to be lady of the house and able to offer a permanent home to her beloved sister. The advantages of acceptance are clear. But for Jane, there were drawbacks; there must have been, because the following morning she sought out Harris and withdrew her consent.

  ‘I conjecture,’ pondered Jane’s niece, Caroline, ‘that the advantages he could offer, and her gratitude for his love, and her long friendship with his family, induced my Aunt to decide that she would marry him . . . but that having accepted him she found she was miserable and that the place and fortune which would certainly be his could not alter the man.’

  Caroline was sure that the refusal was given because Jane did not love Harris, and she honoured her aunt’s integrity. ‘All worldly advantages would have been to her – and she was of an age to know this quite well – My Aunts had very small fortunes and on their Father’s death they and their Mother would be, they were aware, but poorly off – I believe most young women so circumstanced would have taken Mr W. and trusted to love after marriage.’9

  Harris was six years younger than Jane, a large, rather uncouth figure of a man, afflicted with a stammer which tended to make him unsociable. Though Jane was undoubtedly able to look beyond personal disadvantages to the good sense with which the young man was also credited, it is unlikely that they had much in common – Harris was to become a shooting and hunting kind of country squire – and very doubtful that she could either have loved him at the time of the proposal, or been able to convince herself that her gratitude could blossom into conjugal affection.

  It seems likely that Caroline was right: Jane found herself unable to go against her abhorrence of loveless marriage, even for the sake of providing financial security for herself, her sister and their mother. She had given up so much: her first love, her home and the freedom to write. Now she was being asked to surrender her integrity and she could not.

  It is also likely that all her family wished her to marry Harris. Certainly the refusal was made ‘much to the sorrow of Mrs James Austen who thought the match most desirable’.10 In the end she seems to have recognised that this was a case in which feeling must come first. It was no time for prudence.

  Caroline was probably also right in supposing that Jane’s was not the decision which ‘most young women so circumstanced’ would have taken. However, if she had behaved more like other young women and done as her family wished her to do, s
he might have become acquainted with Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1808, Harris’s sister, Catherine Bigg, married the Reverend Mr Herbert Hill who was an uncle of the poet, Robert Southey, a friend of William and Dorothy and the brother-in-law of their close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.11

  There was to be no such connection. Jane put the whole episode firmly behind her, returning to Bath as soon as she could, and her next actions were certainly not a common sequel to a broken engagement. Within days she had taken out her manuscripts and begun to work again. Her life had almost been thrown away, her future and her body almost traded in a mercenary transaction. The realisation of the danger she had fallen into seems to have shocked her out of the mental lethargy into which depression had thrown her and made her determined to act for herself.

  Dorothy made the second honeymoon journey of her life with William and Mary as they travelled back to Grasmere. On one occasion, when they were all tired, ‘William fell asleep, lying upon my breast and I upon Mary.’ Many people have noted – and been amused by – the fact that Dorothy was sitting between the newly-weds in the carriage, but Dorothy seems to have seen nothing remarkable in it herself.

  Her whole account of the wedding is written in the true style of sensibility. Focusing almost exclusively on her own experience of events, it very rarely enters into the feelings of the bride or groom. Dorothy might have argued this was the only honest way to write, the feelings of others being only imperfectly known to us, while to a more rational mind like Jane Austen’s it might have suggested ‘a sensibility too tremblingly alive . . . to every affliction of my own.’

  Dorothy’s description of the wedding day (4th October 1802) would have been particularly open to that accusation. It is an extraordinary account and was, early on, deemed so odd that someone (maybe Dorothy herself, or maybe the first editor of her journals) crossed out part of it which has only been recovered by modern analysis. The part given in italics below is that which has been erased in the manuscript.

  ‘At a little after 8 o’clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the Church. William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing any thing, till Sara came upstairs to me and said ‘They are coming’. This forced me from the bed where I lay and I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William and fell upon his bosom. He and John Hutchinson led me to the house and there I stayed to welcome my dear Mary.’

  It is easy to feel impatient with this account; it is so very egocentric with its ‘my dear little Sara’ and ‘my dear Mary’. Dorothy seems to be spoiling the bride’s big day by demanding attention with her histrionics and it seems very odd that she should welcome Mary into her own home. The proper, considerate thing to do would be to contain her own feelings and let the bride walk home quietly on her husband’s arm.

  However, Dorothy was too taken up with her own feelings to care about propriety. The journal again records a complex of emotions, without clearly defining any of them, but the ritual of the wedding ring identifies William as a conscious participant in Dorothy’s drama. Again he is taking the initiative as he had done during those haunted sleepless nights in Dove Cottage, and it is easy to see why someone felt this deeply symbolic act ought to be suppressed.

  William had entrusted to Dorothy the safekeeping of the ring which was, by tradition, his responsibility. She returned it to him, and gave her blessing to the marriage. But he did not simply take it from her. Just as he had hesitated and returned to her on that February morning when he set off in his new pantaloons to visit Mary, he now paused before leaving for the church and, before he placed that ring on the finger of his bride, put it back on his sister’s finger. It was a private ceremony which – to Dorothy at least – had as much significance as the service that was about to take place.

  It might be said that William married her before he married Mary, and that Dorothy was making a promise in that upstairs room very like the one Mary was about to make in church – ‘keeping only unto him as long as we both shall live.’ Yet William seems to be drawing that promise from her, binding her to him, reminding her that she is still necessary to him. Dorothy sat easily between the newly-weds in the carriage but, if she was at the centre of this marriage, it was William who had placed her there.

  Meanwhile, in Bath, Jane was once more a writer. Taking out the manuscript of Susan (the proto-Northanger Abbey), she began to copy and prepare it for publication.

  She had learned something important about herself: she could not accept anything but a love-match; pragmatic though she was, her integrity would not be compromised. Her feelings could not always be suppressed for the advantage of her family. A marriage of convenience was impossible and a marriage of real affection did not seem likely. It may have been this realisation which made her determined to take some steps to provide for herself, for, as Caroline observed, she knew that, on her father’s death, she would be ‘but poorly off’.

  Like Dorothy, with her conviction that it would be ‘absurd’ for her to think of marriage, Jane seems now to have been considering a future without a husband. They had both turned their backs on that ‘settlement in the world we should aim at . . . the only way we females have of making ourselves of use to Society’. They had both determined to seek another meaning, another purpose, for their lives.

  Part Four

  Twenty-Three

  Writing and Publication

  Being in the middle of someone else’s marriage offered Dorothy reassurance and a kind of security, but it was not a comfortable place to be.

  Some weeks before the wedding William and Dorothy had exchanged bedrooms. Dorothy gave up the dark room next to the kitchen, in which she had slept since their arrival at the cottage, and moved into the room above that had been William’s bedroom. The downstairs, stone-floored room would have offered a little more privacy for the newly married couple than the room above, from which, we know from the testimony of the Journal, Dorothy could hear William’s every move when he was sleepless. But, with sounds carrying too easily throughout the house, the situation cannot have been easy for any of them. Tact, consideration and the kind of forbearance which only comes with real affection would have been necessary.

  Dorothy attempted to continue her journal in the months after the wedding, and kept it up until January of the following year. There are some beautiful descriptions in the same style as the earlier entries, but sometimes she went for days without writing and often had to catch up. She had always had periods of catch-up in her journal, but there is a sense of struggle in these later entries that was never present in the days before the wedding.

  During Mary’s long visit in the winter of 1801 Dorothy had maintained the stream of consciousness and observations that characterise the Grasmere Journal, but now Mary had come as a bride, the current of Dove Cottage life no longer flowed freely onto the page. Resolution was necessary in order to carry on as if nothing had happened. In almost the last entry Dorothy wrote with a kind of determination she had not needed before: ‘I . . . will for the future write regularly and, if I can legibly . . . ’1

  Like Jane Austen exiled in Bath, Dorothy seems to have lost her creative equilibrium and writing had become a struggle. However, she remained loyal to the companions she loved; she made no complaint and soon there was a new addition to the family to demand her devotion. William’s first son, John (usually known as Johnny to distinguish him from his uncle) was born in June 1803. Dorothy’s love for this baby was absorbing and unreasoning. ‘He has a noble countenance,’ she wrote, in one of many long
descriptions, to her friend Catherine Clarkson, ‘if I were not half afraid of making you laugh at me I should say he looks as if he was not the child of ordinary parents.’

  ‘Indeed,’ she concluded, trying to be rational, ‘I think if it is possible to tire you with a long story of him you will be tired now.’ However, in the next sentence her overwhelming love breaks out again. ‘But oh! that you could see him!’2

  Like many a new mother, she was convinced that everyone shared her fascination: ‘It is very affecting’, she enthused, ‘ . . . to see how much John is beloved in the neighbourhood.’3 And: ‘ . . . there is something like greatness in his countenance, a noble manliness which makes the first view of him catch hold of every Body and keeps them looking at him.’4

  There was no danger of this wondrous child being left to cry alone in a distant room as poor little Basil had. A year later, when he sprained his ankle, his devoted aunt explained: ‘[He] is made a pet, and a little hanger-on about his Mother and me, so that whenever we leave him he cries, which bad habit will make him yet engross much of our time . . . ’5

  However, in spite of Johnny’s arrival, there were still times when Dorothy could be alone with her brother. On 15th August 1803, less than a year after the wedding, the Concern re-established itself. Dorothy managed to tear herself from baby-worship and accompany William and Coleridge on a tour of Scotland. It was their first journey together since the unsuccessful German trip.

  William seems to have felt no reluctance in leaving home at this time. At this point in his marriage he was prepared to be away from his wife for six weeks, to travel in the old style with his sister and his friend. As it turned out, for most of the journey brother and sister were alone – companions as they had been in Germany – for once more the Concern fractured, and, after two weeks, Coleridge left the others. The reason for the division seems to have been Coleridge’s unhappiness – the old jealousy he had felt in Germany for his friends’ closeness. ‘I soon found I was a burden on them’ he wrote.6