The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  A niece remembered that Jane Austen was thankful to have been spared the ordeal of childbirth and that she often expressed her relief in her letters. One of the great friends that she made in London was Frances Tilson, who was the wife of one of Henry Austen’s banking colleagues: ‘poor Woman! how can she honestly be breeding again?’43 Frances Tilson was about to give birth to her eighth child – she eventually had eleven. Again, when Jane heard the news that her niece Anna was pregnant for the third time, she was dismayed: ‘Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty. – I am very sorry for her.’44 To another acquaintance, who seemed to be permanently tired and pregnant, she advised ‘the simple regimen of separate rooms’. Another friend, Mrs Benn, ‘has a 13th’: ‘I am quite tired of so many children.’45

  She warned Fanny Knight of the perils of an early marriage, seeing the example of Anna, and not wanting Fanny to wear herself out by having children too young. A letter from aunt to niece counselling against overhasty progress from love to marriage is wisely phrased:

  Do not be in a hurry; depend upon it, the right Man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years, meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as ever He [John Plumptre, with whom Fanny was in love] did, and who will so completely attach you, that you will feel you never really loved before. – And then, by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure, and countenance, while Mrs Wm. Hammond is growing old by confinements and nursing.46

  Few of Jane Austen’s suitors had made a lasting impression on her. As she herself noted, she had high standards. It is gratifying to have in her own words her description of the ideal husband: ‘There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand … where Grace and Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart and Understanding.’ But she was realist enough to know ‘such a person may not come in your way’.47

  The details of the seaside romance that were revealed many years after her death tell us far more about Cassandra than they do about Jane. The story came to light in the first place only because Cassandra was struck by another young man (a Mr Henry Eldridge of the Engineers) who reminded her of Jane’s seaside lover: a good-looking, clever man who died young. This was Cassandra projecting her own tragedy on to her sister. Maybe it was her own story of loving and losing Tom Fowle and her own romantic nature, her belief in the irreplaceable ‘one great love’, that deep down she was really remembering. For the nieces who had known Jane Austen well, the seaside romance left no lasting legacy: she ‘never had any attachment that overclouded her happiness, for long. This had not gone far enough, to leave misery behind.’48

  People sometimes wonder how Jane Austen could write so compellingly about love when she never married or had a grand passion of her own. We are fortunate to have a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, in which she has been solicited for, and gives, advice on what Fanny Burney had once called ‘the minute and complex intricacies of the human heart’.49 It gives exceptional insight into her own view of such matters: ‘I read yours through the very evening I received it, getting away by myself. I could not bear to leave off when I had once begun. I was full of curiosity and concern,’ she begins. She finds Fanny’s dilemma of the utmost interest: ‘I really am impatient myself to be writing something on so very interesting a subject, though I have no hope of writing anything to the purpose … I could lament in one sentence and laugh in the next.’

  Then, turning agony aunt, she tells Fanny that it is her own belief that no one dies from disappointment in love. This is the down-to-earth wisdom of Shakespeare’s Rosalind in As You Like It (‘men have died from time to time but not for love’), as opposed to the romantic fantasy of the novel of sensibility (the suicide of Goethe’s Young Werther on the loss of his beloved Charlotte). ‘Wisdom is better than Wit,’ writes Austen. She tells it to Fanny as she sees it: ‘from the time of our being in London together, I thought you really very much in love. – But you certainly are not at all – there is no concealing it. – What strange creatures we are! – It seems as if your being secure of him … had made you indifferent.’

  But her advice is firm: ‘And now, my dear Fanny, having written so much on one side of the question, I shall turn round and entreat you not to commit yourself farther, and not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection; and if his deficiences of Manner etc etc strike you more than all his good qualities, if you continue to think strongly of them, give him up at once.’ But Jane Austen can’t suppress her wit, even for the sake of all this wisdom. She betrays herself by a revealing comment, which was excised from the first edition of letters. Fanny had confided in her aunt the rather shocking detail that she had sneaked off to take a peep in her suitor’s bedroom: ‘Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively. The dirty shaving rag was exquisite! Such a circumstance ought to be in print. Much too good to be lost.’50

  A dirty shaving rag in a man’s private bedroom: once again, it is an object, a small thing, that takes us to the heart of Jane Austen’s vision of the world. In this case, the thing that embodies marriage is mundane and rather unpleasant.

  One of her last letters written to Fanny Knight is a response to yet another dilemma in love. A letter dating just a few months short of her death reveals her delight in her niece, but there is also a sadness that this lovely voice will be suppressed by the state of marriage:

  You are inimitable, irresistable. You are the delight of my Life. Such Letters, such entertaining Letters, as you have lately sent! – Such a description of your queer little heart! – Such a lovely display of what Imagination does. – You are worth your weight in Gold, or even in the new Silver Coinage. – I cannot express to you what I have felt in reading your history of yourself – how full of Pity and Concern and Admiration and Amusement I have been. You are the Paragon of all that is Silly and Sensible, common-place and eccentric, Sad and Lively, Provoking and Interesting. – Who can keep pace with the fluctuations of your Fancy, the Capprizios of your Taste, the Contradictions of your Feelings? – You are so odd! – and all the time, so perfectly natural – so peculiar in yourself, and yet so like everybody else! – It is very, very gratifying to me to know you so intimately. You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your Heart. – Oh! What a loss it will be, when you are married. You are too agreable in your single state, too agreable as a Neice.51

  The thought of Fanny married was almost more than she could bear: ‘I shall hate you when your delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal and maternal affections.’ She truly believed that marriage could stifle women’s voices. This was the fate to which she would not submit herself in her own life. The delicious play of her own mind would never be settled into conjugal and maternal affections.

  Jane Austen writes brilliantly about courtship and love, but always in a way that is leavened with a healthy dose of realism. Hers are not novels in which the heroine falls in love at first sight with a handsome stranger who becomes an ideal husband. The handsome stranger – Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, Frank Churchill – turns out to be a bad bet. More often than not, the true love is a fraternal figure, such as Edmund Bertram, George Knightley or Edward Ferrars. When Fanny Price marries the cousin with whom she has been brought up and who has always treated her as a little sister, there is a whiff of brother–sister incest, a motif that is surprisingly common in the literature of the age.52 The closest Austen comes to the romantic cliché of the romantic stranger is the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy, and yet they begin by disliking one another. Love often comes slowly, surprisingly.

  In her novels, Austen boldly abstains from reporting the grand speeches of ‘romantic’ lovers. At the point where the hero and heroine are finally united, she
leaves much to the imagination of the reader. Mr Knightley resolutely says, ‘I cannot make speeches … If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’ Emma’s internalized emotions are beautifully expressed but never spoken: ‘What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’53 Edmund Bertram’s love for Fanny takes time: ‘I only intreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire.’54

  The closest she comes to depicting extreme passion is Captain Wentworth’s emotional declaration to Anne Elliot: ‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me that I am not too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.’55 In the first draft of the novel, his declaration of love is much more mildly phrased (merely ‘Anne, my own dear Anne!’) and the bulk of the scene is given in reported speech. The unsaid is more important than the said: Wentworth plays awkwardly with the back of a chair in the course of ‘a silent, but a very powerful Dialogue’.56 Jane Austen then revised her closing chapter so that the speech was made more passionate – but it is given via a letter. There is always a feeling of being at one remove, of authorial detachment. It is the distance that confers the intensity.

  ‘I have no doubt that Aunt Jane was beloved of several in the course of her life and was herself very capable of loving’, wrote her niece Caroline. Contrariwise, ‘Aunt Jane never had any attachment that overclouded her happiness for long’, wrote her nephew James Edward. But perhaps the voice of the novels is more to be trusted than the words of the family memoirs: ‘It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage,’ says Emma Woodhouse. ‘A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.’57 For Jane Austen herself it was perfectly comprehensible to refuse Harris Bigg-Wither. She was not ready for anybody who asked her.

  She did not want her own voice to be stifled by marriage. She was, I believe, happy to remain single: apart from the Bigg-Wither episode, the closest she ever got to marriage was her fictionalizing in her father’s parish register. Perhaps she genuinely preferred the appellation that her father gave her in one of the vellum notebooks: ‘Miss Jane Austen, Spinster’.58 Once Cassandra had made the decision to remain a spinster, Jane saw that she did not have to be separated from the sister she adored. They could be together, for ever.

  As for children, her books were the only offspring she desired. Catherine Hubback, a niece, wrote: ‘she always said her books were her children, and supplied her sufficient interest for happiness; and some of her letters, triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom from care were most amusing’.59 The words ‘rejoicing in her own freedom from care’ are very revealing. Austen simply did not envy the women of her acquaintance who were married and exhausted by husband and children. She gave birth to her novels. They were her ‘sucking child’ or ‘my own darling child’. ‘My dear Anna,’ she wrote in 1816 following the birth of her niece’s daughter, ‘As I wish very much to see your Jemima, I am sure you will like to see my Emma.’60

  11

  The Ivory Miniature

  On 29 May 1780, the accomplished society artist Richard Crosse meticulously recorded in his ledger that he had ‘received of Mrs Lefroy eight pounds eight shillings’ for her ivory miniature.1 It is a little bit, two inches high, of ivory worked with a fine brush in watercolour. It shows a most elegant woman, her hair powdered and tied. There is intelligence in her eyes and kindness in her half-smile.

  The miniature portrait was a very particular genre, highly popular in Jane Austen’s day: it was almost always drawn from life, with the intention of creating as accurate a representation of the subject as possible. Typically, such pieces would be executed as keepsakes, intended to hold the image of a beloved person in the memory during their absence. The portrait would be given to a close friend or a lover or a family member – perhaps sent to a brother away at sea. The modern equivalent would be the photograph placed on the mantelpiece. And indeed it was with the advent of photography in the mid-Victorian era that the genre went into decline.

  When a person died, their miniature could be turned into a piece of mourning jewellery, as is the case here, where the date of Mrs Lefroy’s death is engraved on the tiny gilded frame.

  Anne Lefroy, sometimes known, because of her sophistication, as Madam Lefroy (though Jane always referred to her as Mrs Lefroy) was one of the Austens’ closest neighbours. The Reverend George Lefroy and his wife moved to Ashe rectory, just down the road from Steventon, in 1783. They expanded the cultural horizons of the area. George Lefroy transformed the undistinguished rectory into a suitable residence for a Georgian gentleman and made it a place where he could entertain. His parents had lived abroad and the home was furnished with lovely artefacts from Italy. He was described as ‘an excellent man, of courtly manners, who knew the world and mixed in it’.2 His wife was a great beauty and a cultured woman, with ‘an exquisite taste for poetry’. Allegedly, she ‘could almost recite the chief English poets by heart, especially Milton, Pope, Collins, Gray, and the poetical passages of Shakespeare’.3 The Lefroys had a carriage, which Anne would often lend out to families without one, such as the Austens.

  Anne’s brother, the author and genealogist Egerton Brydges, was devoted to her, describing her as ‘one of the most amiable and eloquent women I ever knew. She was a great reader, and her rapidity of apprehension was like lightning.’4 He attributed his own love of poetry to her influence. She wrote and was indeed a published poet. Three of her poems appeared in The Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry and a larger collection was published posthumously.5 She was also an accomplished amateur painter, particularly of flowers and insects. She was ‘fond of society and was the life of every party into which she entered’. All in all, she was ‘universally beloved and admired’.6

  The Lefroys loved the theatre and had a wide circle of friends, who were introduced to the Austens. Mrs Lefroy was not, however, an amateur actress herself. She was a great friend of the Duchess of Bolton, but refused to take part in her amateur production of Jane Shore at Hackwood Park, just nine miles from Ashe. She declined by verse: ‘Can I a wife, a mother, tread the Stage,/Burn with false fire and glow with mimic Rage?’7

  Firm in her Christian faith, Anne Lefroy was devoted to her charity work and opened a school for the poor children of the surrounding neighbourhood, where she taught them to read. Remarkably, she also personally vaccinated the people of her husband’s parish against smallpox. She wrote to her son, telling him all about her admiration of Dr Edward Jenner’s work with the cowpox vaccine and told him that she had inoculated ‘upwards of 800 poor with my own hands’.8 As a young mother living in Basingstoke, she had experienced a severe outbreak of smallpox which greatly affected her, and accounted for her interest in Jenner and his inoculations. Of her seven children, three died, two of them in infancy in Jane Austen’s lifetime. She was famous for driving a donkey cart around the area, as Jane was later to do. Many of her visits to the poor were made on this.

  A friend who knew her in the early days of her marriage wrote that George and Anne were ‘so pleasant’: ‘Anne was one of the happiest beings I ever saw. She laughed almost the whole time, but it did not seem a mockery of joy but genuine mirth.’9 The same could have been said of Jane Austen. Born in 1749, Mrs Lefroy was many years older than Jane but they formed a close and loving friendship, beginning from the time when the Lefroys invited the bright young Austen girl to play with their daughter. Anne was in many ways a more congenial mother figure to Jane than the rather less accomplished and certainly less attractive Mrs Austen (who lost her teeth at an early age, making her look older than she was). Jane’s literary aspirations were encouraged and she was given free rein i
n the library at the Ashe parsonage. Mrs Lefroy influenced Austen’s taste and judgements, just as she shaped her own brother’s bent for poetry.10

  There are few direct references to Mrs Lefroy in Jane Austen’s surviving letters, the great majority of which are to Cassandra, who was not so close to her and who may even have been jealous of the close friendship between her younger sister and the older woman. Such references as there are include such mundane information as the fact that Mrs Lefroy admired Jane’s new velvet cap at a ball. Nevertheless, her involvement in the aborted romances with nephew Tom Lefroy and the Reverend Samuel Blackall suggests her centrality to Austen’s early life.

  Even after she moved away from Steventon, Jane continued to visit her mentor in the rectory at Ashe. In September 1801, Mrs Lefroy told her son that Jane and her sister had spent the day with her at the rectory, adding, rather wistfully, ‘they mean to return to Bath and after that I suppose it will be long before they again visit Steventon’.11 They were reunited in 1803 for a longer visit, during which she described a charming picture of Jane and Cassandra helping with her school: ‘I am now writing surrounded by my school and with the [Miss Austens] in the room.’12 This may have been the last happy time that they spent together.

  Mrs Lefroy had continued her life of good works. During the bad winter of February 1800, she set up a straw manufactory to give the women and children of the district a chance to earn a little money. Straw was in demand for making hats. As well as performing charitable acts such as this, she encouraged her children to look to the wider world. One of her sons, Christopher Edward Lefroy, grew up to be a poet and an author of tales set in foreign parts. He eventually oversaw the suppression of the slave trade in Surinam.

  Mrs Lefroy worried greatly about a French invasion. She told her son of how James Austen was helping to raise a Corps of Volunteers in the summer of 1803. She fantasized about defending her country herself: ‘In case of actual invasion … I think I could handle Cartridges if not fire a musket myself upon such an occasion.’13 One can see why she was a woman whom Jane Austen revered.