The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  One of the sermon writers she admired was Bishop Thomas Sherlock: ‘I am very fond of Sherlock’s Sermons, prefer them to almost any.’38 Turning to Sherlock after Cooper, it feels a relief to read his cool, balanced, classically Anglican prose. In one characteristic passage he reflected upon Psalm 19 verse 12: ‘Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.’ Sherlock explains that the deadliest faults are those secret ones that result from self-ignorance, habit or simply a failure to reflect upon the consequences for others of one’s own actions. These were very much the concerns of Austen in her novels.

  One of the books Jane Austen owned was A Companion to the Altar: shewing the nature and necessity of a sacramental preparation in order to our worthy receiving the Holy Communion, to which are added Prayers and Meditations (1793). Her great-niece Florence Austen claimed that ‘this book of devotions [was] always used by Jane Austen’.39 The book is inscribed with her signature and the date 1794.40 It may have been presented to her at the time of her own confirmation. In order to be prepared for the blessed sacrament, a devout communicant was expected to embrace six particulars, the first being self-examination: ‘we must search our hearts, and examine our consciences’. This seems a sentiment close to Jane Austen’s own heart.

  Many of her heroines endure a journey of self-discovery. Elizabeth Bennet is forced to admit, ‘I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away … Till this moment, I never knew myself.’41 Emma Woodhouse undergoes a similar moment of self-revelation. However it is Marianne Dashwood, one of Austen’s most interesting heroines, the only one shown in the grip of an all-consuming erotic passion, who is forced to admit her sins against a higher being: ‘I wonder at my recovery, – wonder that the very eagerness of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God, and to you all, did not kill me at once … Whenever I looked toward the past, I saw some duty neglected, or some failing indulged.’42

  Austen’s most pious heroine is Fanny Price, described by Henry Crawford as ‘well-principled and religious’. Fanny appeals to the demands of conscience: ‘We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.’ Her purity of mind provides a strong contrast to that of Mary Crawford: ‘still shewn a mind led astray and bewildered, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light’.43 The morally aberrant characters in Mansfield Park have a distinctly jaundiced view of established religion: Maria Bertram expresses her approval that Sotherton Court is placed far from the church and Mary Crawford expresses her approbation for the closure of the family chapel there: ‘every generation has its improvements’.44

  Fanny Price, along with Marianne Dashwood and Anne Elliot, has a deep love of nature: ‘Here’s harmony! … Here’s repose! … When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.’45 One of the strongest threads in the tapestry of eighteenth-century Anglicanism was deism or ‘natural religion’, the belief that the harmony of the universe bore witness to a Creator. In 1802, William Paley in Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature used the analogy of the watch and the watchmaker to prove the existence of God. Fanny’s train of thought from ‘the sublimity of Nature’ to religious and moral precepts comes from within this tradition.46

  Mansfield Park is Austen’s most moral and religious novel. Her clerical cousin George Cooke, whom she admired as an ‘impressive preacher of earnest awakening sermons’, considered it ‘the most sensible Novel he had ever read’, and was particularly delighted by ‘the Manner in which the Clergy are treated’.47 The Cookes no doubt approved of Edmund Bertram, for whom the priesthood is not simply a career but a religious vocation. ‘Do you think the church itself never chosen then?’ he asks Mary Crawford. She replies, ‘Never is a black word. But yes, in the never of conversation which means not very often, I do think it.’ For her, ordination for religion’s sake without a living is ‘madness indeed, absolute madness’.48

  When Mary Crawford tells him that a ‘clergyman is nothing’ Edmund responds: ‘I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally – which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence. No one here can call the office nothing.’49 And when he finally extricates himself from Mary, she fires a wounding parting shot, accusing him of Evangelical tendencies: ‘At this rate, you will soon reform every body at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you next, it may be as a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists, or as a missionary in foreign parts.’50

  It is sometimes said that Jane Austen described Mansfield Park as being about ‘Ordination’; that view is based on a misreading of one of her letters, but there is no doubt that Edmund’s vocation is at the centre of the novel. In January 1813, she wrote a lovely letter to Cassandra, describing the arrival of the first edition of Pride and Prejudice and speaking of her love of the character of Elizabeth Bennet. She tells of how she had cut the length of the second volume to sharpen up the narrative: ‘I have lopt and cropt so successfully however that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S. and S. altogether.’ Then she says, ‘Now I will try to write of something else; – it shall be a complete change of subject.’ In other words, the letter will now change subject. She then writes: ‘Ordination. I am glad to find your enquiries have ended so well.’ That is to say, she has previously asked Cassandra, who was staying with James, the cleric of the family, to confirm some technical details about the process of ordination. So the joke is that it is not a ‘complete change of subject’: she is moving from the final revisions of her previous novels to the preliminary research for her next one. Ever the writer, she is still talking about the writing process. Concerned as ever with her realism, she wants to get the details right with regard to Edmund’s ordination. She also wants to get her topography right, so she then asks Cassandra ‘if you could discover whether Northamptonshire is a County of Hedgerows’. In short, then, ‘Ordination’ is not the ‘subject’ of Mansfield Park, but it plays a crucial – and accurately rendered – part within the novel.51

  At the close of the novel, Sir Thomas blames his daughters’ misconduct on a lack of ‘principle’ but also on their having merely paid lip-service to religion: ‘they had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice’.52 It is a lesson that Sir Thomas had also had to learn. What mattered to Austen was the way in which religion shaped the ‘daily practice’ of living a good life.

  Jane Austen gave full rein to her sincere religious faith in Mansfield Park, but, just as more modern readers have been puzzled by the seriousness of Fanny Price and the morality of the novel, some of her family and friends were uncomfortable with her more serious voice. Jane copied out their opinions, keen to know what they truly thought of her novels: one opinion was ‘Edmund objected to, as cold and formal’, while another reader ‘could not bear Fanny’. ‘Of its good sense and moral Tendency there can be no doubt,’ said a third, ‘but as you beg me to be perfectly honest, I must confess I prefer P and P.’53

  The majority of her intimates shared this belief that Pride and Prejudice was greatly superior. Gentle timid Fanny Price is no Lizzy Bennet, yet she surprises everyone in the novel by her quiet strength. She refuses to be bullied by Sir Thomas into marrying a man she doesn’t love, and she alone sees the moral corruption that lies behind the charm of the Crawfords. Edmund, she perceives,

  ‘is blinded, and nothing will open his eyes; nothing can, after having had truths before him so long in vain. – He will marry her, and be poor and miserable. God grant that her influence do not ma
ke him cease to be respectable!’ – She looked over the letter again. ‘“So very fond of me!” ’tis nonsense all. She loves nobody but herself and her brother. “Her friends leading her astray for years!” She is quite as likely to have led them astray. They have all, perhaps, been corrupting one another.’54

  ‘God grant …’: Austen uses the word ‘God’ as an exclamation only in the most serious of moments. Marianne at her most vulnerable shows her despair when she is coldly ‘cut’ by Willoughby: ‘Good God! Willoughby what is the meaning of this?’ Darcy is compelled to exclaim at seeing Elizabeth’s distress at Lydia’s elopement: ‘Good God! What is the matter!’ Captain Wentworth after Louisa’s fall from the Cobb exclaims in the bitterest agony: ‘Oh God! her father and mother.’55 Fanny’s ardent words at this key moment are about the closest Austen ever comes to speaking, sermonlike, of being ‘led astray’.

  She fervently believed however in the importance of fortitude and ‘exertion’, a word she often repeated at stressful times. In Persuasion, Captain Benwick’s excessive grief for his betrothed is presented as self-indulgent and Anne urges him to take solace from works of prose and memoirs of real-life characters who have suffered ‘religious endurances’.56 Austen’s own long illness in 1816 and 1817 forced her into great spiritual exertion and endurance of her own. She had time to think and reflect and prepare herself for death.

  That she knew she was dying is suggested by an account left by Caroline Austen. She remembered that Jane and Cassandra made a fruitless journey to Cheltenham to find a cure. Their return journey to Chawton took a detour to Kintbury to visit the Fowles: ‘Mary Jane Fowle, told me afterwards, that Aunt Jane went over the old places, and recalled old recollections associated with them, in a very particular manner – looked at them, my cousin thought, as if she never expected to see them again.’57

  In her final illness Jane Austen told her friend Anne Sharp of her gratitude to God for having her family around her: ‘I have so many alleviations and comforts to bless the Almighty for! … if I live to be an old Woman I must expect to wish I had died now, blessed in the tenderness of such a Family, and before I had survived either them or their affection.’58 Henry related in his biographical notice of how on her deathbed she took the sacrament while she was still mentally aware. And Cassandra described her beloved sister’s last moments in a detailed letter to Fanny Knight:

  She felt herself to be dying about half an hour before she became tranquil and apparently unconscious. During that half hour was her struggle, poor Soul! she said she could not tell us what she sufferd, tho she complaind of little fixed pain. When I asked her if there was any thing she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death and some of her words were ‘God grant me patience, Pray for me, Oh Pray for me.’59

  She died in the rented house to which she had moved in College Street, Winchester, during the small hours of a warm summer night, Friday 18 July 1817.

  The following week she was laid to rest in Winchester Cathedral. The ledger stone over her grave narrates that she endured her illness with ‘the patience and the hopes of a Christian’. It praises her ‘charity, devotion, faith and purity’, ‘The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temperament, the extraordinary endowments of her mind’. The latter phrase is a tacit recognition of her greatness as a novelist (since the novels had been published anonymously, it would have been inappropriate to say more of them than this). But the primary emphasis is on her Christian virtues. That was as it should have been: for all her wit and irreverence, Jane Austen was devoutly and profoundly Christian, as both a woman and a writer.

  Fittingly enough, her final literary work was a poem, written two days before her death, on the feast day of St Swithin, the saint in whose church in Bath lay the bones of her beloved father. Winchester races were held that day. Tradition had it that if it rained on St Swithin’s, it would rain for forty days more. Jane Austen, on her sickbed, woke up on St Swithin’s Day, 15 July 1817, to ‘hard rain in the morning’60 and wrote the poem, playfully adopting the voice of the Saint:

  These races and revels and dissolute measures With which you’re debasing a neighboring Plain Let them stand – You shall meet with your curse in your pleasures Set off for your course, I’ll pursue with my rain.61

  Talking about the weather was as English as anything could be – with the possible exception of being a faithful but unostentatious middle-of-theroad Anglican.

  12

  The Daughter of Mansfield

  The large oil painting, attributed to Zoffany, hung in Kenwood House, the Hampstead seat of Lord Mansfield. It depicts two beautiful young girls. The blonde in the foreground is sitting down and is dressed in a pink silk and lace dress. She has flowers in her hair and a double strand of pearls around her neck and is holding a book. She is reaching out to the girl behind her, taking her hand and pulling her into the frame. She hardly needs to do so as the eye is drawn irresistibly to this other girl, with the high cheekbones and enigmatic smile. She rests a forefinger quizzically on her cheek and gazes confidently out at the artist.

  She is dressed in sumptuous white satin and wears a string of large pearls around her neck, droplet pear and diamond ear-rings and a bejewelled turban with a feather perching jauntily at the back. She carries an armful of fruit and is wearing an exquisite blue and gold shawl which floats in the breeze as she walks. She is in motion, bursting with vitality and energy, while the girl in pink sits still.

  The girls are Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Belle. They are the adopted daughters of Lord Mansfield on the terrace overlooking the grounds of Kenwood House with a spectacular view of St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance. Kenwood House had been redesigned by Robert Adam in the 1760s, and later in the century its grounds were laid out with a lake and parklands by Humphry Repton.

  The girls are cousins. Lady Elizabeth Murray lost her mother as a child and was brought to live with her uncle and aunt, the childless Mansfields, who made her their heir. Dido Belle was the illegitimate daughter of Mansfield’s nephew Captain John Lindsay and an enslaved black woman called Maria Belle. The girls were companions and equals, as the portrait confirms. Mansfield doted on Dido. She was described by visitors as a much loved family member, though an American loyalist called Thomas Hutchinson who was living in London was scathing about her valued position in the family. He called her ‘pert’ and was shocked by her status in the family:

  A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. Lord M … calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her – I dare not say criminal [that is, sexual].1

  Jane Austen might have well have visited Kenwood House to view the portraits and the grounds. Genteel members of the public were often shown round at times when the owner was absent, as at many great houses (including the imaginary Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice). Fanny Burney recorded a visit to Kenwood in her diary in June 1792. Whether or not Jane Austen saw this extraordinary painting, she did have a connection with one of the women in the portrait: Lady Elizabeth Murray was a friend and neighbour of her wealthy brother Edward.

  Lady Elizabeth grew up to marry George Finch-Hatton of Eastwell Park near Godmersham. On a visit to Edward in 1805, Jane went to dinner at Eastwell Park and was seated next to Mr Finch-Hatton. She was very disappointed with the woman who had been brought up with Dido: ‘I have discovered that Ly Elizabeth: for a woman of her age and situation, has astonishingly little to say for herself.’ She was equally unimpressed with her daughter, Miss Hatton, but liked her small boys: ‘George is a fine boy, and well-behaved, but Daniel cheifly delighted me; the good humour of his countenance is quite bewitching.’2 She met the Finch-Hattons on many occasions when she was staying at Godmersham, but always found Elizabeth quiet and dull. Nevertheless, to have known and been on friendly terms with Lord Mansfield’s heir and adopted daughter was
of great interest to Jane Austen, since Mansfield was one of the heroes of the age.

  Dido was the most celebrated mixed-race woman in England. When Lord Mansfield died in 1793, he left her a legacy and an annuity, while officially confirming her freedom. She married an Englishman later that year and had three sons. They lived in Hanover Square until her death in 1804. The Austens had many acquaintances among plantation families, so Jane may have had direct acquaintance with other mixed-race girls, but Dido is the one whose life she certainly knew about. In her unfinished last novel, Sanditon, there is a ‘half Mulatto’ heiress called Miss Lambe. A wealthy girl of seventeen, in delicate health, she has been brought to England from the West Indies to finish her education. ‘Chilly and tender’ in the English weather, she ‘had a maid of her own, was to have the best room in the lodgings, and was always of the first consequence in every plan of Mrs. G.’3 – rather, we might say, as Dido was always of the first consequence in every plan of the real-life Lord M.

  For Jane Austen and her contemporaries, the name of Mansfield was synonymous with the great civil rights question of the age: the campaign against slavery. The first stepping-stone towards the abolition of the slave trade was laid in 1772 when Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, made a monumental ruling in the James Somersett case. Somersett, an enslaved African who had been brought to England by his American owner, escaped, having endured brutal beatings. He was caught and readied to be sent to Jamaica, to be sold on as a plantation labourer. But following an intervention from three people claiming to be his godparents when he was baptized a Christian in England, he was brought before Mansfield under the Habeas Corpus Act. Asked to decide whether Somersett’s imprisonment was legal, Lord Mansfield heard both sides of the argument and then reserved his judgment for five weeks. He eventually ruled that forcibly sending Somersett abroad because ‘he absented himself from his service or for any other cause’ was illegal: ‘No authority can be found for it in the laws of this country and therefore … James Somersett must be discharged.’ Within his judgment was a general principle: ‘The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of now being introduced by Courts of Justice upon mere reasoning or inferences from any principles, natural or political.’4