The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  Visits to Southampton, Gloucestershire and Kent had exposed the girls to a selection of eligible young men, but Cassandra’s engagement was not to a mysterious stranger met at a ball or a fashionable watering hole. It was to a young man who had been like a brother to her. Tom Fowle was one of the boarders, educated in the schoolroom at the family home. We know very little about him except that he was liked enormously by the Austen family and was an active participant in amateur dramatics at Steventon. Tom Fowle, who gained his MA from Oxford in 1794, was destined for the Church. But a home and an income were dependent on the living in Shropshire, so the lovers had to wait for their wedding day.

  In the meantime, in January of 1796, Cassandra went to stay with Tom’s family at their parsonage near Newbury. Jane and Cassandra had undergone some temporary separations when one or other of them had been on family visits, but this was the harbinger of something new and unwelcome: a life apart, in which letter-writing would become the prime means of sustaining the sisterly relationship. Jane Austen’s first surviving letter dates from precisely this moment. The surviving letters to Cassandra are the most intimate record we have of Jane’s inner life. The first of them was written on Cassandra’s twenty-third birthday – almost certainly the first birthday the sisters were apart – and it begins with the words ‘In the first place I hope you will live twenty-three years longer.’6 This is playful, but it barely conceals the thought that Cassandra might not live another twentythree years: marriage meant childbirth which often meant death.

  In the letters that Jane wrote to Cassandra at this time, she gives the impression of trying out several voices: gossipy, jokey, affectionate, mockpompous (‘I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last Letter, for I write only for Fame, and without any view to pecuniary Emolument’).7 She makes light of the gap that is opening up between them, but in her heart she is thinking of the great distance between Steventon and Shropshire. When she came to write her novels, she was always acutely aware that distance from a sister was one of the penalties of marriage: in her most ‘perfect’ novel, Pride and Prejudice, Jane and Elizabeth ‘in addition to every other source of happiness’ are separated only by ‘thirty miles’.8

  Jane Austen liked women. She had several cherished female friends and was devoted to those she esteemed. She deeply valued the loyalty and companionship of those friends whom she could regard almost as sisters. She was particularly fond of the Bigg sisters, Catherine and Alethea, and the Lloyd sisters, Martha and Mary.

  Relationships between female friends were extremely close-knit and it was common for such bonds to be strengthened by marriage to brothers, as was the case with the Austens and the Lloyds. Mary Lloyd married James Austen, and Martha, when she was sixty-two, married Frank Austen. Furthermore, the Lloyds were cousins to Cassandra’s betrothed, Tom Fowle. Mary and Martha’s sister Eliza married her cousin, Fulwar Fowle, who was another of Mr Austen’s Steventon pupils. The proposed marriage between Cassandra and Tom would have made her a cousin by marriage to the Lloyds as well as their sister-in-law. The relationships are almost as involuted as those of the Trevanions, the Byrons and the Leighs: the Lloyds and the Fowles were descended from the Cravens, who were themselves related to the Leighs of Stoneleigh, so Tom Fowle was also a distant cousin of Cassandra by descent.9

  Cath Bigg was Jane’s choice of partner at balls where men were in short supply. She described her as ‘nice and composed-looking’, which was something of a tease since Cath and Alethea, like the fictional Catherine Morland, had a propensity for misusing the word ‘nice’: ‘The Biggs would call her a nice woman,’ Austen once joked. Henry Tilney’s taking Catherine to task – ‘and this is a nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you two are very nice young ladies’ – may well have been a private joke between Jane Austen and the Biggs.10 As will be seen, a time would come when Jane herself almost became a sister-in-law to the Biggs. She didn’t, but she remained on the best of terms with Catherine and Alethea.

  The Lloyd sisters had lost a small brother to smallpox, and though the girls survived the epidemic both Martha and Mary were severely scarred. Martha was among the most beloved of Jane Austen’s friends. She was gentle, sweet-tempered and deeply Christian. She was probably for some time a lady’s companion to a Mrs Dundas, an invalid at Barton Court in Kintbury. She was also an excellent cook. After her mother’s death, she lived with the Austens as a family member. Martha was ten years older than Jane Austen, who was always drawn to older women as friends. ‘With what true simpathy our feelings are shared by Martha, you need not be told; – she is the friend and Sister under every circumstance,’ she wrote to Cassandra.11

  But it was always her blood sister to whom she remained closest. So the period following the announcement of the engagement was a time of great uncertainty. Some sentences of the letter sent by Jane to Cassandra at the home of her future in-laws are unusually stiff, even distant, in tone: ‘I am very glad to find from Mary that Mr and Mrs Fowle are pleased with you. I hope you will continue to give satisfaction.’12

  The Shropshire living still had not come through, so Tom Fowle accepted a temporary post as chaplain to his patron, Lord Craven, in the West Indies. In April 1797, Cassandra heard the tragic news that her fiancé had died of yellow fever in San Domingo. It was a blow to the whole family, and Jane immediately wrote to cousin Eliza to inform her of the news. Eliza in turn reported the mood at Steventon: ‘I have just received a letter from Steventon where they are all in great Affliction … for the death of Mr. Fowle … Jane says that her Sister behaves with a degree of resolution and Propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation.’13 It is tantalizing that we have only Eliza’s report of this key Jane Austen letter, not the thing itself.

  Tom was buried at sea, so there was no grave, nowhere to go to mourn him. All Cassandra had left of him was a small legacy in his will. Lord Craven later said that he would never have taken him to the West Indies if he had known that he was engaged to be married. Cold comfort indeed.

  Cassandra’s conduct in bereavement might have been impeccable, but she all too quickly adopted widow’s weeds and abandoned all further thoughts of matrimony. She resigned herself to spinsterhood and didn’t change her mind.

  Jane Austen was a very private person. In her letters to Cassandra she allowed herself a freedom of expression and thought denied to many others of her family and friends. They were, according to their niece Caroline Austen, ‘open and confidential’. In the Georgian era, letters were like newspapers, passed around and read aloud to members of the family and friends, but we can see from Jane Austen’s comments that some parts of them were intended to remain private. She was careful to share only selected parts of Cassandra’s letters: ‘I read all the scraps I could of your letter’ (to Sackree the maid), and, again, ‘I read the chief of your letter’ (to Edward).14

  Jane Austen’s letters to Cassandra catch her in the act of private conversation, which is one reason why her voice sounds so modern and familiar. It’s true that most of the letters pass on news and exchange information, sometimes trivial or seemingly incomprehensible, but that inimitable voice can’t be supressed. ‘We left Guildford at 20 minutes before 12 – (I hope somebody cares for these minutiae),’15 she says to Cassandra. She greatly looked forward to receiving her letters and feigned jealousy at the thought of her sister writing to other siblings: ‘I shall not take the trouble of announcing to you any more of Mary’s children, if, instead of thanking me for the intelligence, you always sit down and write to James. I am sure nobody can desire your letters so much as I do, and I don’t think anybody deserves them so well.’16

  Despite the fact that neither of them married, in later years the sisters were separated for long periods of time, and in Jane’s letters her disappointment at their separation always shines through. She admired and adored her elder sister, as Caroline Austen noted: ‘the habit of looking up to her begun in childhood, seemed always to continue … she would frequentl
y say to me … Aunt Cassandra could teach everything much better than she could – Aunt Cass knew more … she did always really think of her sister, as the superior to herself.’17 The finest comic writer of the age actually described her sister Cassandra as ‘the finest comic writer of the present age’.18

  Jane Austen’s profound capacity for female friendship is not always obvious from her letters. Her deliciously irreverent and unguarded remarks have upon occasion aroused some readers’ contempt, such as when she makes tasteless jokes about miscarriage, death or adultery. She could be sharp and acerbic with silly females of her acquaintance, especially those who doted (stupidly) on their children or their husbands.

  It is well known that she made a tasteless joke about miscarriage: ‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright. – I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’19 ‘Only think’, she wrote, ‘of Mrs Holder being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do, to make one cease to abuse her.’20 She could also be rude to respected family members: ‘my Aunt may do what she likes with her frigates’.21

  But all of these wickedly funny remarks were made to her sister in private correspondence with the express purpose of making Cassandra laugh. The infamous remark about miscarriage has been quoted many times as proof of her callousness, but, as Christopher Ricks notes in a brilliant essay on Jane Austen and children, when this quotation is read aloud to an audience of women it usually provokes great guffaws of laughter.22 It tends to be male critics who find her joke distasteful; women are made of sterner stuff. Often Jane Austen’s bad-taste jokes are made at the expense of men: ‘Mr Waller is dead, I see; – I cannot grieve about it, nor, perhaps, can his Widow very much.’23 Nevertheless, the jokes about death do come close to the bone. ‘I am sorry for the Beaches’ loss of their little girl,’ she wrote to Cassandra, ‘especially as it is the one so much like me.’24

  Apart from the obvious point that the Georgians had a different way of dealing with death, such comments are key to understanding the particular workings of Jane and Cassandra’s relationship. Jane’s letters show how she liked to play the role of the naughty little sister, confessing to Cassandra that she has a hangover, that she has overspent her allowance on trivialities, or that she has behaved indecorously: ‘imagine everything most profligate in the way of flirting’, she writes. And ‘If I am wild Beast, I cannot help it.’25

  Many of her letters show her entertaining her sister with rude remarks, often about other pairs of sisters. She could be critical and catty, especially when it came to physical attractiveness. In one account of a ball she describes ‘the two Miss Coxes’ as ‘vulgar, broad featured’, the Miss Maitlands with ‘large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose’, the Debary sisters reeking of ‘bad breath’, the Miss Atkinsons, ‘fat girls with short noses’, and Mrs Blount with her ‘broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck’.26 As for Lady Fagg and her daughters: ‘I never saw so plain a family, five sisters so very plain!’27

  She makes the women she is describing seem like figures in a caricature by the great satirical artist Gillray. The more outrageous the comment, the more she made her sister laugh. Anna Austen confirms this picture in her memoir when she claimed that she and Jane made Cassandra laugh so much that she would ‘beg us to leave off’, saying ‘How can you both be so foolish?’28

  The more absurd the wordplay the better: ‘I shall keep my ten pounds too, to wrap myself up in next winter.’ ‘I took the liberty a few days ago of asking your black velvet bonnet to lend me its cawl,’ ‘We shall have pease soon – I mean to have them with a couple of Ducks from Wood Barn and Maria Middleton.’ Two tables ‘covered with green baize send their best love’. ‘I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.’29 It is only really in her letters to Cassandra, not the few surviving ones to her brothers, that the ‘naughty little sister’ voice comes through.

  The unique bond with Cassandra can be highlighted by considering Jane Austen’s relationships with her sisters-in-law. Her relationship with brother James’s second wife, her old friend Mary Lloyd, soured over the years. Jane intimates that Mary was jealous of the family’s closeness, resenting her husband for spending so much time with them.30 By 1813, the gloves were off: ‘How can Mrs J. Austen be so provokingly ill-judging? – I should have expected better from her professed if not real regard for my Mother.’31 Jane wrote to Cassandra, who had been on a shopping commission for Mary: ‘I hope the half of that sum will not greatly exceed what you had intended to offer upon the altar of sister-in-law affection.’ That last is a tart phrase. It shows that Jane could say anything to Cassandra in complete confidence, and that they shared the belief that a sister-in-law could never be quite the same as a real sister.

  Mary was careful with money, a trait that Jane despised. In one of her last letters before her death she described her sister Mary as ‘in the main not a liberal-minded Woman’ and told a close friend that her character would not mend: ‘expect it not my dear Anne; too late, too late in the day’.32 It has been suggested that she gave Mrs Norris some of Mary’s unpleasant traits,33 but there is perhaps more of a resemblance to the tight-fisted Mrs John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Sisters-in-law fare badly in this novel. The disinheritance with which it begins is one of the most unsisterly acts in all of the novels:

  Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum? And what possible claim could the Miss Dashwoods, who were related to him only by half blood, which she considered as no relationship at all, have on his generosity to so large an amount. It was very well known that no affection was ever supposed to exist between the children of any man by different marriages; and why was he to ruin himself, and their poor little Harry, by giving away all his money to his half sisters?34

  Another of Jane’s sisters-in-law, the wealthy and beautiful Elizabeth Bridges who married her lucky brother Edward, appears to have disliked her. Jane was jealous of Elizabeth’s claim on Cassandra, as Elizabeth took every opportunity to invite the older girl for extended visits first at Rowling House and then later at Godmersham. Elizabeth was usually pregnant or recovering from a pregnancy, and even Jane admitted that she did the ‘Business of Mothering’ very well. But she could not love Elizabeth as a sister. One of the nieces observed that although Elizabeth’s children enjoyed their clever aunt as ‘a playfellow, and as a teller of stories’, they were ‘not really fond of her’. Anna remarked that their mother was not fond of Jane and ‘preferred the elder sister’.35 When Jane Austen says of the Bridges of Goodnestone, ‘a little talent went a long way’, she meant that although they were fashionable and entertained lavishly, they were not intellectual. Nevertheless Jane enjoyed the luxury of Kent. ‘I shall eat Ice and drink French wine, and be above Vulgar Economy,’ she said during a visit when Elizabeth was once more pregnant, and ‘unusually active for her situation and size’.36 Jane was shocked but not unduly distressed when she later heard the news that Elizabeth had died giving birth to her eleventh child, a boy called Brook. ‘We need not enter into a Panegyric on the Departed,’ she remarked drily.37 Her concern was for the children and her own dear brother Edward.

  Another sister-in-law who died in childbed was Fanny Palmer. Jane liked this delicate-featured pretty young blonde, who was just seventeen when she married brother Charles in Bermuda. She drew on her sister-in-law’s experience as a naval wife when she created the character of Mrs Croft in Persuasion. Charles was devoted to his wife, whom he called ‘Fan’. The couple had three small daughters who lived with them aboard the Namur. Twelve of Fanny’s letters survive from this time and
they paint a compelling picture of the life of a young sailor’s wife bringing up her children in cramped and confined conditions. Her letters describe her making ‘tidy little Spencers’ (short jackets) for the small girls, taking them to feed the pigeons, reading in the ship’s library and going to the ship’s theatre, which she loved.38

  In Persuasion, there is a long discussion about the suitability of women living on board ship. Captain Wentworth’s old-fashioned belief that a ship is no place for a woman is given short shrift by his sister: ‘Oh, Frederick! – But I cannot believe it of you. – All idle refinement! – Women may be as comfortable on board, as in the best house in England. I believe I have lived as much on board as most women, and I know nothing superior to the accommodation of a man of war.’ For good measure, Mrs Croft adds, ‘I hate to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.’39

  Fanny Palmer fitted well into the category of wives who have had their happiest times aboard ship. When she stayed on shore with Charles’s patron, Sir Tom Williams (who had once been married to Charles’s cousin Jane Cooper), she was anxious to get back on board. ‘Tho I received every kindness and attention from them both,’ she told her sister, ‘I cannot help feeling a great desire to be at home, however uncomfortable that home may be – but I must submit and pretend to like it. I believe Capt. Austen rather wishes to stay than otherwise.’40

  Charles returned home after an absence of years to show off his new wife and new family. He was a devoted family man, which sometimes irked Jane: ‘I think I have just done a good deed – extracted Charles from his wife and children upstairs and made him get ready to go out shooting.’41 Nevertheless, she liked Fanny and was always pleased when they visited, noting in one letter that they had arrived to stay at Chawton after a very rough sea passage: ‘here they are safe and well, just like their own nice selves, Fanny looking as neat and white this morn as possible, and dear Charles all affectionate, placid, quiet, cheerful good humour’.42