Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  William and Dorothy’s devotion could still make a third party feel jealous. This continuation of their relationship – Dorothy’s unaltered importance to her brother – seems to fulfil the pledge he had made in the upstairs room before his wedding, as he slipped the ring onto Dorothy’s finger. It was a sincere promise; but it was not going to be easy to keep.

  In 1803 Jane Austen was once more able to write, and she had enough energy and concentration to complete the new manuscript of Susan in three months. However, once it was finished she did not approach a publisher herself. She stepped aside, as a modest young lady should, and allowed a man – her brother Henry – to act for her. It was Henry’s agent, William Seymour, who sold the book to Benjamin Crosby and Son, for the sum of £10 (about the equivalent of a housemaid’s yearly wage, if board, lodging and clothing are taken into account). After her father’s one half-hearted approach to Cadell, Jane relied heavily on Henry to negotiate her way through the world of publishing. And, though this indirect approach may have been the correct way for a young lady to conduct business, it was not a wise decision.

  Henry Austen was considered to be, ‘the handsomest of his family and in the opinion of his own father also the most talented.’ But – ‘There were others who formed a different estimate and considered his abilities greater in show than in reality’.7 Jane may have inclined towards her father’s opinion, for Henry was her favourite brother; but perhaps on this occasion his knowledge of the business in hand was ‘greater in show than reality’. His choice of publisher was almost certainly a mistake. Crosby’s business relied heavily on just the kind of Gothic Romances which are ridiculed mercilessly in Northanger Abbey. An approach to a rival firm would have been wiser. Crosby may well have felt that £10 was a small price to pay to prevent anyone else from publishing the book.

  Henry and Seymour also made the elementary mistake of having no date for publication written into their agreement; only a vague undertaking was made to print the book quite soon. This was disastrous. Crosby did not publish Susan himself and when, six years later, Jane attempted to push him into action, he was able to threaten her with legal proceedings if she should renege on their deal and publish the book elsewhere.

  Like Dorothy, who had seen her hope of an independent settlement evaporate as William invested the Calvert legacy unwisely, Jane trusted this beloved brother with what was most valuable to her. They would not have been the only women of the time who had to bite their tongues as their business affairs were mishandled by their men-folk.

  For now, all that mattered was that the book was sold. The exciting promise of publication was enough to make work possible even amid the distractions of Bath. Writing could earn money. It was important.

  Marriage was still on Jane’s mind as she began the incomplete novel which is now known as The Watsons. She employed again the engine which had driven the plots of her first two books – the poverty of a family of sisters and their need to marry. But there was a marked change in tone for this story. Perhaps affected by the difficult choice which she had recently had to make herself, she presented a much bleaker, more pressing version of the conflict between integrity and prudence than she had in either Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. The Watson sisters are noticeably poorer than the Dashwoods or the Bennets: they labour over laundry and cookery themselves – unable to afford the luxury of having ‘nothing to do in the kitchen’. They are also much more explicit in their discussions about marriage.

  The two opposing approaches to the subject are stated clearly in the first few pages. Miss Watson starkly declares: ‘we must marry . . . my father cannot provide for us’, but Emma Watson – who seems destined to be the novel’s heroine – speaks with the voice of integrity. ‘[T]o pursue a man merely for the sake of situation – is a sort of thing that shocks me’, she says. ‘I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest.’8

  This may well have been the argument which ran through Jane’s head as she agonised overnight at Manydown after her acceptance of Harris.

  The world of The Watsons is a gloomy one, coloured perhaps by lingering depression. Mr Watson is in his room, dying slowly as the novel begins, and Emma (who is returning to the family after having been brought up by a wealthy aunt) finds her sisters Penelope and Margaret ruthlessly pursuing husbands. The eldest sister Elizabeth is a little more sympathetic, but she does not hide their desperate situation from Emma. When their father dies they will have hardly any income and no home either for, interestingly, Mr Watson is a clergyman and the house in which they live is tied to his job.

  Towards the end of the fragment, Emma’s brother, Robert, arrives from his legal practice in Croydon, to represent that third alternative to marriage or destitution: a brother’s protection. In this case, it is a particularly unpalatable alternative. Robert bemoans the fact that Emma’s aunt has married, making no provision for her niece who is now ‘returned upon [her family’s] hands without a sixpence.’ He does not spare Emma’s feelings at all as he reflects: ‘It will be a sad break-up when [my father] dies. Pity, you can none of you get married! You must come to Croydon as well as the rest and see what you can do there.’9

  The prospect of living and husband-hunting in Croydon is made even less appealing by Robert’s wife, another selfish sister-in-law – rather in the style of Fanny Dashwood – who is ‘very pleased with herself for having had . . . six thousand pounds, and for being now in possession of a very smart house’.10

  This was not a book with which Jane was likely to write herself out of depression. It is not surprising that it was abandoned after about 17,000 words. She had chosen a subject which must continually remind her of her own precarious situation. The only way in which her own circumstances were materially better than Emma Watson’s was that her father was in good health. Or, at least, he appeared to be.

  Dorothy continued to write even though the Grasmere Journal had faltered to a close. But, after William’s marriage, she turned to a different kind of work: an account of her Scottish Tour. In fact she began to write – as Jane had from her earliest years – for publication. Like Jane she aimed, primarily, to share her work with her family and friends. She claimed, at first, to have no other readership in mind, but in the end she did consider wider publication.

  The household’s money troubles continued, despite the settlement of the Lowther debt, so it is possible that Dorothy was, in the early years of William’s marriage, exploring the possibility of making money with her pen.

  In the previous year, after the wedding had become a certainty, she had begun to study German again. ‘I read a little in Lessing and the Grammar’, she wrote on 8th February 1802, and over the next few months there are intermittent references to work which may have been a revival of her hopes of earning an income from translation: on 9th February ‘We did a little of Lessing’, on 15th February ‘set on to reading German’, on 10th March ‘I read a little German’, etc.

  Now that the marriage had taken place, she chose to put her energy into travel writing, a kind of work that was very popular – and saleable – at the time. ‘I am not writing a journal,’ she explained, ‘for we took no notes, but recollections of our Tour in the form of a journal’.11

  As usual she denigrated her own work, which had the rather cumbersome title of Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland: A.D. 1803. ‘I think’, she wrote, ‘journals of Tours except as far as one is interested in the travellers are very uninteresting things.’ However, she intended that this journal, which was not a journal, should be copied and passed about among her friends and relations.

  Many of her first audience believed it to be her finest work, but modern readers who have enjoyed the spontaneity of the Grasmere Journal often find the more self-conscious, conventional tone of these Scottish recollections disappointing. It is true that some scenes are observed in a business-like way that calls to mind Fanny Price noticing ‘the bearin
gs of the roads, the difference of the soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children . . . ’

  ‘[W]e descended towards a broad vale,’ wrote Dorothy of the approach to the village of Crawfordjohn, ‘children playing, linen bleaching. The vale was open pastures and corn-fields unfenced, the land poor . . . the people of the village, who were making hay, all stared at us and our carriage.’12

  Such descriptions lack the charm of the journals, but Dorothy was still able to bring to her work an accurate eye and make the scenes memorable with details such as the bleaching linen and staring haymakers.

  It is worth remembering that, even if all the giblet pies, bowel-troubles and other personal details were lifted out of the Grasmere Journals, they would still never have been publishable in Dorothy’s lifetime. Today we value their disconnectedness, finding them fresh and quirky, but no publisher of the early nineteenth century would have been enthusiastic about a style of writing so far removed from any genre he knew.

  Accounts of journeys, on the other hand, were a recognised and popular form of literature, and Dorothy seems to have determined to try her hand at one. It was three years now since her hopes of earning money by translation had been dashed in Germany, but maybe she was, once more, looking for a way to earn some independence. Perhaps the emotional upheaval of William’s marriage was making her look outward for a wider audience and a wider purpose to her life. For Dorothy was a remarkably good travel writer and it seems unlikely that she can have been completely unaware of her own talent. De Quincey believed the Recollections to be ‘a monument to her power of catching and expressing all the hidden beauties of natural scenery with a felicity of diction, a truth, and strength, that far transcend Gilpin, or professional writers on those subjects.’13

  Her first qualification for the work was an almost superhuman memory. Reading some of her descriptions it is hard to believe that she was recalling things she had seen, maybe, two years earlier. ‘The stone both of the roof and walls is sculptured with leaves and flowers . . . ’ she wrote of the chapel at Roslin, ‘and the whole of their groundwork is stained by time with softest colours.’14

  Her style acknowledges picturesque conventions, connecting her readers with other works in this genre. The wish she had shown in the Alfoxton Journal to sometimes improve upon the view that she saw – to compose pictures – is particularly evident in this new project. She described one valley as ‘cold and naked, wanting hedgerows and comfortable houses.’15 and she found that there was in the mountain Ben Lomond ‘something . . . which disappointed me, – a want of massiveness and simplicity, perhaps from the top being broken into three distinct stages.’ 16

  Unlike the Grasmere Journal, the Recollections look at the scene unflinchingly, not attempting to exclude the un-picturesque. Scotland, Dorothy told her readers repeatedly and unreservedly, was dirty. ‘Smoke and blackness are the wild growth of a Highland hut’,17 she assured them, and, finding one inn to be, ‘exceedingly clean’, she exclaimed, ‘I could hardly believe we were still in Scotland.’18

  She allowed herself to express opinions rather more than in the journals and she disapproved of some of the ‘improvements’ which many owners of large estates were making at this time. Like Fanny Price of Mansfield Park Dorothy grieved over the threatened felling of an avenue of trees. ‘We were told’, she wrote of one great parkland, ‘that some improver of pleasure-grounds had advised Lord B. to cut down the trees, and lay the whole open to the lawn . . .  His own better taste, or that of some other person, I suppose, had saved them from the axe.’ 19

  Dorothy’s ability to observe closely and respond emotionally to the things that she saw was very effective in travelogue, a form of writing which aims not only to describe but also to evoke a sense of place and foreignness.

  Near Loch Lomond she spent the night in a house unlike any most of her readers would ever have encountered. ‘It consisted’, she explained, ‘of three apartments, – the cow-house at one end, the kitchen or house in the middle, and the spence at the other end. The rooms were divided, not up to the rigging, but only to the beginning of the roof, so that there was a free passage for light and smoke from one end of the house to the other.’

  This is an efficient enough description, but Dorothy aimed not only to make her reader understand the layout of this building in which light and smoke – and, presumably, the smells from the cow-house – circulated freely, she also evoked the memorable experience of sleeping in it.

  ‘I went to bed some time before the family’ she wrote, and though she does not say so, it would seem her bed was in the ‘spence’. ‘The door was shut between us, and they had a bright fire, which I could not see; but the light it sent up among the varnished rafters and beams . . . produced the most beautiful effect that can be conceived. It was like what I should suppose an underground cave or temple to be . . . ’20

  Dorothy’s pen brought to life not only places, but people too. There was, for example, the minister whom they found working in a hayfield in ‘a shabby black coat’, who advised William how to mend the broken wheel of their carriage, but did not ‘offer to lend any assistance himself . . .  as if it were more natural for him to dictate, and because he thought it more fit that William should do it himself. He spoke much about the propriety of every man’s lending all the assistance in his power to travellers, and with some ostentation or self-praise.’

  Sometimes she displayed an almost psychological insight into character. At Jedburgh she described their hostess as, ‘a good woman, who, though above seventy years old, moved about as briskly as if she was only seventeen . . .  She had a quick eye, and keen strong features, and a joyousness in her motions . . .  I found afterwards,’ she continued, ‘that she had been subject to fits of dejection and ill-health: we then conjectured that her overflowing gaiety and strength might in part be attributed to the same cause as her former dejection.’21 Dorothy seems to have recognised what we would now call a bi-polar condition, based, presumably, simply on her own observations since there would have been no such diagnosis at the time.

  Perhaps her well-observed characters – together with her vivid evocation of place – might have found their way into novels, had she lived, as Jane Austen did, among people who valued, discussed and experimented with that genre. Like Jane, Dorothy was a critical reader of other people’s fiction and certainly understood the importance of characterisation. In 1815 she would write of Scott’s novel Waverley, ‘you care not a farthing for the hero . . . the Scotch Characters are so outrageously masked by peculiarities that there is no pleasure in contemplating them – indeed in the delineation of character he greatly fails throughout’.22

  It is unlikely that Dorothy considered writing novels herself. At the very heart of Dove Cottage’s little community was poetry. Life there was dedicated to the creation of poems, its philosophy summed up by Samuel Daniel, a seventeenth century poet read at its fireside: Daniel claimed that ‘weakness speaks in prose, but pow’r in verse.’

  Poetry was considered the highest form of literature. In his Essay on Morals, for example, William Wordsworth declared that a mere prose treatise on ethics could never be effective because it would lack the ‘power to melt into our affections, to incorporate itself with the blood and juices of our minds’. Only poetry, he believed, could do that. Interestingly, he was claiming for poetry the same moral purpose which Samuel Johnson had demanded of novels.

  Wordsworth did not simply defend the traditional value placed on poetry. The philosophy which he and Coleridge had developed was expanding poetry’s scope. In the Advertisement that accompanied the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, William warned that some readers would find the poems to be unlike any others they had read, but he advised that, ‘while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents . . . ’

  This is very like Jane Austen’s defence of p
rose fiction: she claimed that novels were works ‘in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties . . . are conveyed to the world.’

  William, as a poet, was laying claim to the territory of the novel. Deferring to him as she did on such matters, it is hardly surprising that Dorothy should have felt her prose to be of little value, and she doubted her ability to write poetry.

  ‘Do not think that I was ever bold enough to hope to compose verses for the pleasure of grown persons’, she wrote in one letter. ‘Descriptions, Sentiments, or little stories for children was all I could be ambitious of doing and I did try one story, but failed so sadly that I was completely discouraged.’

  If only she had persisted with the story, rather than giving up after a single attempt! However, she had little confidence in her own talents – which is slightly odd. She was a self-effacing woman in many ways but, if she had no reliance on her own judgement, she most certainly did trust William’s. She had an unshakeable faith in his pronouncements.23 If he had told her that her writing was good – told her repeatedly and encouraged her to write more – is it possible that she would have disbelieved his verdict?

  Dorothy continued in her letter, ‘no one was ever more inapt at molding words into regular metre. I have often tried,’ she wrote, ‘when I have been walking alone (muttering to myself as is my Brother’s custom) to express my feelings in verse . . .  but prose and rhyme and blank verse were jumbled together and nothing ever came of it.’