The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  Early in the story Reginald warns his sister Mrs Vernon that Lady Susan is ‘the most accomplished Coquette in England’.10 But she is no mere flirt. She is Jane Austen’s most unscrupulous, even sadistic, female character. She is a woman of ‘perverted abilities’, almost a feminine version of the notorious Lovelace of Richardson’s Clarissa. Her response to Reginald’s admonitions against her is to make him fall in love with her: ‘There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike, acknowledge one’s superiority.’11 Reginald de Courcy cannot resist the prospect of enjoying ‘the conversation of a Woman of high mental powers’.12 He is twelve years her junior. She is an older woman, an experienced temptress who manipulates men by her sexual charisma. In modern parlance, she is not so much a coquette as a ‘cougar’, one of the first in English literature.

  Lady Susan Vernon is charming, clever, beautiful, vicious, witty and morally corrupt. She is also a bad mother. She is utterly lacking in maternal feeling and heartily dislikes her guileless daughter, Frederica. She wreaks revenge on all who cross her. ‘There is something agreable in feelings so easily worked on,’ she says of Reginald.13 We are not far from the world of that most infamous eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782).

  Lady Susan is a character firmly rooted in city life. ‘London will always be the fairest field of action,’ she says.14 As in Richardson and Burney, the metropolis is the immoral centre of corrupt society. It is only when Lady Susan is buried alive in the country that she makes mischief: she is bored and she can’t help herself. She boldly enters into an adulterous affair with her friend’s husband, Manwaring, and continues the affair despite being secretely engaged to Reginald. When she is caught red-handed and Reginald breaks off the engagement, she shows no remorse and duly marries a rich and dull baronet. Reginald is ‘talked, flattered and finessed’ into marrying the dull, pious daughter, Frederica. For all Lady Susan’s villainy, she is utterly fascinating. Her language gives her energy and charm that make her letters fizz with life. She refuses to repent, and she is not punished by the author.

  The femme fatale is a character type that clearly fascinated Jane Austen. We have seen that following a visit to the theatre she spoke of Don Juan as a ‘fascinating compound of cruelty and lust’, and there are similar characteristics in Willoughby and Wickham. Lady Susan is their feminine counterpart. The only woman to approach her in Austen’s published fiction is Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, though she is more of a coquette than an outright seductress. In each case, what really intrigues Austen is the power of language. ‘If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence,’ writes Lady Susan Vernon. ‘Consideration and Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty.’15 This might just tell us something about Lady Susan’s creator as well: the reason why so many men esteemed Jane Austen and considered proposing marriage to her was her eloquence and wit.

  It might be imagined that Austen held back from developing Lady Susan into a full-length novel and seeking to publish it because the subject matter was too risqué. But that would not necessarily have deterred her. In 1794 the actress turned novelist Mary Robinson had published a brilliant epistolary novel called The Widow, in which there is both an unprincipled widow of the ton (fashionable world) named Amelia Vernon and a scheming but lively and charismatic anti-heroine called Lady Seymour who bears a strong resemblance to Lady Susan (Austen’s choice of the name Vernon is perhaps a nod of gratitude to Mrs Robinson). Again, Madame de Staël’s international epistolary bestseller of 1802, Delphine, had included closely analogous plot elements: a young widow, a man tricked into marrying the daughter when he really loves the widow, a scheming woman (this one called Sophie de Vernon). Austen would not have been ashamed to be counted in the company of Robinson and de Staël.

  The more likely reason for Austen’s setting aside of Lady Susan was discontent with its epistolary form. Though the device of composing a novel in the form of letters gave her the opportunity to write from the point of view of more than half a dozen different characters, the structure does not quite work because the counter-balancing voices are insufficiently strong. Lady Susan dominates the narrative. The epistolary form did not give Austen the authorial control that she required. From this point on, she wrote in the form of third-person narrative, where she could be the one in control.

  The epistolary experiment gave Austen the chance to find voices for particular character types, but some of the most lively sequences in Lady Susan are those in which extended passages of dialogue are transcribed into the letters.16 Austen was beginning to see that her true forte was the spoken voice and the immediate social encounter, as opposed to the reflection and retrospection of the character sitting writing a letter. Her frequent theatregoing in the Bath years intensified her love for dialogue and witty exchange. According to family tradition, ‘Elinor and Marianne’ was originally an epistolary novel. Its rewriting as Sense and Sensibility would have involved major surgery, the reworking of letters between parted sisters into dialogue between sisters who are nearly always together.

  The direction in which Austen’s art was moving is made clear by her other project in the period when the manuscript of ‘Susan’ was gathering dust in Crosby’s office in Stationer’s Court. Fun as it was to create a character with Lady Susan’s excesses and transgression, Austen’s more serious ambition as a novelist was to explore the real emotional lives of women constrained by their social and financial circumstances.

  Mr Watson is a widowed clergyman with two sons and four daughters. The youngest daughter, Emma, has been brought up by a rich aunt and is consequently better educated and more refined than her sisters. But when her aunt contracts a foolish second marriage, Emma Watson is obliged to return to her father’s house. As suggested earlier, this plot-line is a striking reversal of the conventional adoption narrative.

  Living near the Watsons are the Osbornes, a great titled family. Emma attracts attention from the boorish Lord Osborne, while one of her husband-hunting sisters, Mary, pursues Lord Osborne’s arrogant, socialclimbing friend Tom Musgrave. The plan was that Emma would decline a marriage proposal from Lord Osborne, and would eventually marry Osborne’s virtuous ex-tutor, Mr Howard.

  The father, Mr Watson, is seriously ill in the opening chapters. Austen confided to her sister Cassandra that the intention was that he should die in the course of the work. According to family tradition, Jane abandoned the novel upon the sudden and unexpected death of her own father. Its plot-line had become too uncomfortably close to her own. Elizabeth Jenkins, among the best of Austen’s twentieth-century biographers, wrote of the story’s ‘painful realism’, suggesting that its depiction of daughters who are a burden upon their family was just too much for Austen to go on contemplating at a time when she was herself dependent on her brothers.17

  Yet the plot-line of the plight of (impoverished) unmarried daughters was one that Jane Austen never abandoned. She mined this vein to its full extent. The novel sitting at Crosby’s was about a very ordinary girl of limited means who is mistaken for being an heiress. And it was not so very long after George Austen’s death that his daughter was returning to, and seeking to publish, a novel that begins with a father’s death leaving three sisters in reduced circumstances: Sense and Sensibility.

  It may simply have been that Jane Austen thought that the Emma Watson novel wasn’t terribly good. It ends after five chapters, suggesting that she just ran out of steam. She was not always a finisher – the rapidity of movement from subject to subject in so many of her letters reveals that with the quickness of her mind came a low boredom threshold. If a story wasn’t working, she would leave it and go on to another one.

  The interesting thing about Cassandra’s description of the plot of the novel, recorded many years later, is what it reveals about her sister’s compositional method: Jane Austen sketched out the entire plot of the novel first. She knew from the beginning h
ow each of her novels was going to end. The work was not in the plotting, but in the execution. With rigorous self-criticism, she saw that the writing in The Watsons was not flowing and that the characters were failing to come to life. The aristocratic Osborne household was beyond her experience and she knew it. Emma Watson herself, and the character of the little boy called Charles Blake, are nicely rendered, but there is no sparkle to the prose. Notably lacking is the sophisticated Austen device of seeming to be both inside and outside her characters, with the author sympathetically animating their thought processes while simultaneously directing her irony against them.

  Jane Austen was a worker. She revised and improved and honed. We know that she made late changes to her juvenile writings, as late as 1809, and these were changes made to stories intended for private use, not public consumption. Artistic perfectionism was the only reason for continuing to work on them. As for the published novels, the revisions to the first three would have been substantial, going far beyond the changes to their titles.

  Henry Austen, who knew her books better than anyone apart from Cassandra, commented on her compositional methods: ‘For though in composition she was equally rapid and correct, yet an invincible distrust of her own judgement induced her to withhold her works from the public, till time and many perusals had satisfied her that the charm of recent composition was dissolved.’18 This is absolutely right with regard to the ‘time and many perusals’ his sister devoted to her drafts, but perhaps wrong in the phrase ‘invincible distrust of her own judgement’: it was rather that she trusted the considered judgement that came with rewriting. Just as it takes her heroines time to make the right choice of a husband, so it took her time to perfect the right words for each sentence of each novel.

  In the meantime, she was still waiting for Crosby to publish ‘Susan’. By the spring of 1809, she realized that the case was hopeless. Determined to know once and for all whether he intended to honour his contract, she wrote to Crosby. Her letter was polite, but extremely firm. If he had lost the manuscript, she could send another. If he had decided not to publish, then she would find another publisher. Unable to resist a closing barb of wit, she signed off the letter ‘I am Gentlemen etc. etc. MAD.’ The reply, she instructed, was to be directed to Mrs Ashton Dennis at the Southampton Post Office. MAD: Mrs Ashton Dennis. Not Austen but Ashton.

  Jane Austen’s brother Frank with his laptop open and ready for use

  Richard Crosby19 replied promptly and curtly, saying that they had purchased the manuscript outright with no legal obligation to publish it and no firm stipulation as to time. If she or anyone else sought to publish it elsewhere, they would sue. She could, however, buy it back for the original sum of £10. Tellingly, she did not buy back the manuscript. She probably could not afford to at this time. The very best bit of this sad and annoying story is that she had the money to buy back the rights in 1816, at which point she added the ‘Advertisement’ which duly appeared when the novel was published posthumously:

  This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.20

  Only then was Crosby told that ‘Susan’ had been written by the author of four novels, including the highly successful Pride and Prejudice.

  Humiliated as she must have felt in 1809, she set about finding another publisher. With ‘Susan’ temporarily on the shelf, she returned to the two other full-length manuscripts that she had drafted back in the late 1790s. After the letter to Crosby of April 1809, there is a huge gap in her surviving correspondence. We jump two years to April 1811.21 This two-year gap is extremely frustrating for a biographer as this was the time that she found her first publisher. In the absence of letters, we have no idea how or why she turned to Thomas Egerton of Whitehall. Nor do we know if she – or Henry Austen or William Seymour acting on her behalf – approached, and was rejected by, other more famous and more literary houses. Fanny Burney’s publisher Cadell and Davies had rejected her, Crosby had let her down. Did she try Joseph Johnson, who had published Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda? Or G. G. Robinson, who published Elizabeth Inchbald? We simply don’t know, but the choice of Egerton’s Military Library has the feel of a last resort.

  But when he accepted Sense and Sensibility she was delighted. The surviving correspondence picks up after the long gap of two years with Jane Austen back in London, in extremely high spirits. She wrote from Sloane Street in April 1811, full of news of ‘pleasant little parties’, theatre-visits, trips to museums and exhibitions, and shopping. ‘I am sorry to tell you’, she wrote to Cassandra, ‘that I am getting very extravagant and spending all my Money; and what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too.’22 The high spirits were in no small way connected to the fact that she was deep in proof-correcting for Sense and Sensibility. Her excitement is evident:

  No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S. and S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child … I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to W.s. [Willoughby’s] first appearance. Mrs. K.[night] regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait till May, but I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June. – Henry does not neglect it; he has hurried the Printer, and says he will see him again today. – It will not stand still during his absence, it will be sent to Eliza.23

  Any writer who has had a book published will recognize the special thrill of seeing one’s words in proof for the first time. As if by magic, words written in one’s own hand – the labour of quill and ink on blank paper – have reappeared in the permanent form of print on a publisher’s sheets. It is the moment of transition from the dream of professional authorship to the reality.

  The method of publication does not, however, suggest great faith in the author on Egerton’s part. He did not offer to buy the copyright, but chose the method which presented the least risk to him. He accepted Sense and Sensibility on a commission basis. This meant that the main risk was to the author. The author was expected to pay initial printing costs (this could be several hundred pounds, depending on the size of the print run) and the expenses for advertisement, which might be as much as £50. The profit on sales (if all went well) would then be shared between the publisher and the author. On the title page of Sense and Sensibility it says ‘PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR’. To a degree, this is the early nineteenth-century equivalent of vanity publishing.

  So who put up the money for the initial publishing costs? When Jane Austen sold ‘Susan’ to Crosby, she received £10 for the copyright and if he had gone ahead the rest of the costs would have been his. This time it was different. The initial costs for a print run of 750 copies would have been about £180.24 ‘Printed for the Author’ clearly indicates that Egerton did not front the money himself. Jane Austen’s own allowance was meagre: in her father’s lifetime she was given £20 a year for personal expenses. After George Austen’s death, Mrs Austen had receipts of little more than £40 per quarter from her late husband’s Old South Sea Annuities, from which she had to meet all her own expenses and those of her two unmarried daughters.25 In January 1807 Mrs Austen began the new year with just £99 in hand.26 There was some additional support from her sons, especially Frank, and occasional small gifts of money from wealthier relatives, but £180 was a huge sum for such a speculative endeavour as the publication of a first novel by an unknown lady.

  One
possibility is that Henry’s bank advanced the money, but there is no record of this. Another intriguing possibility is that the money was fronted by a generous benefactor. In the course of those remarks about the printing and proofing of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen wrote, ‘I am very much gratified by Mrs K.’s interest in it; and whatever may be the event of it as to my credit with her [my italics], sincerely wish her curiosity could be satisfied sooner than is now probable. I think she will like my Elinor, but cannot build on any thing else.’27

  Why was Mrs Knight, her brother Edward’s adoptive mother, involved in the process? What was the ‘credit’ that Jane Austen mentions in relation to her liking the novel? The word could mean ‘good faith’ or ‘reputation’, but it could also have been meant in the financial sense. In the past Mrs Knight had regularly given Jane small sums of money.28 What did Austen mean by ‘Mrs. K. regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait till May’ in the passage quoted above regarding the publication of Sense and Sensibility? Merely that Mrs Knight was looking forward to the book’s appearance? Or that she was hoping for her credit to be repaid? Could it be that she was Austen’s literary patron in a larger capacity than has hitherto been assumed, that she was determined to help see her become a published author?