Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  The expense of bringing in character witnesses had amounted to £2,000. Mrs Leigh-Perrot said she shuddered to think that innocent people without resources had probably been hanged. The shop was in financial trouble. Mr Smith, the owner, had left his wife and gone bankrupt. Miss Gregory was his sister-in-law. The shop assistant Charles Filby was her lover and they possibly hatched a blackmail plot together.

  Vindicated, the Leigh-Perrots went back to their house in Bath, though Mountague Cholmeley growled that ‘infernal Bath’ was a den of villains and a harbour of all sorts of swindlers’. Mrs Leigh-Perrot wanted her accusers put in the pillory, but her solicitor told her this was impracticable.

  Despite the falsity of the accusations, a faint shadow hung about her. She was later suspected of stealing garden plants. A college friend of James-Edward Austen-Leigh, Alexander Dyce, wrote later in his copy of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion that the family were ‘dreadfully shocked at the disgrace which she brought upon them’ and that the lady had ‘an invincible propensity to stealing’. If so, she was not the only rich woman to show this weakness. She was notoriously stingy. Six years later she exasperated Jane by failing to hand over a trifling sum she owed her, making only vague offers of payment in kind. Might it not be possible that Gregory and Filby, having seen her steal previously, planted the lace on this occasion in an attempt to get justice as they saw it?

  Mrs Leigh-Perrot was disappointed when James-Edward, son, grandson and great-grandson of clergymen, followed them into the Church. She felt his good looks and charm could do better, and threatened financial sanctions if he persisted. She became capricious, sometimes saying she would leave her house, Scarlets, to him, sometimes promising to buy him a living, at other times denying him. However, she relented and made him her heir on condition he added the name Leigh to Austen. Thus he founded the family of Austen-Leighs. He always felt, however, that his great-aunt could and should have helped him earlier.

  When Jane Austen was asked which of her characters she liked best, unhesitatingly she replied, ‘Edmund Bertram and Mr Knightley’, adding that she knew real English gentlemen were often very different. The conscientious clergyman, the brave sailor and the responsible landowner were her ideals: but she was clear-eyed enough to recognize how often the reality fell short.

  6

  The Marriage Market

  WHEN JANE WAS twenty-one, tragedy struck her sister. Cassandra had become engaged in 1795 to the Revd Thomas Fowle, a young man eight years older than she was. He had been one of her father’s pupils from 1779-83, living in the house from the time Cassandra was six until she was ten. He was a friend of her brother James, and his father had been a college friend of Mr Austen. Like his tutor and doubtless on his recommendation Thomas went to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1783. By 1788 he was holder of two curacies and in 1793 his cousin Lord Craven presented him with a living, the rectory of Allington, Wiltshire. He was also appointed Lord Craven’s domestic chaplain. Tom may have proposed to Cassandra when he officiated at the wedding of her cousin and one-time schoolfellow, Jane Cooper, to Captain Thomas Williams in 1792 when Cassandra was nineteen. The engagement was eminently suitable. Thomas’s father was Vicar of Kintbury. Thomas’s brother Fulwar, also one of George’s pupils, succeeded his father and lived at Kintbury till he died in 1840. Fulwar was married to his cousin Eliza Lloyd (pronounced Floyd), whose sisters, Martha and Mary, were friends of Jane. The name was pronounced in this way as the family were originally Welsh.

  Mr and Mrs Austen must have been highly pleased with their daughter’s prospects of happiness and Mr and Mrs Fowle were certainly pleased at the idea of having Cassandra as their daughter-in-law. But Tom’s income was small and the young couple agreed to wait to marry until one of the livings Lord Craven held in Shropshire fell vacant. The engagement was never officially announced.

  Lord Craven took his chaplain with him when he went as Colonel of the Buffs (3rd Foot) to help put down a slave revolt in the West Indies in 1795. Thomas, hesitating to offend his patron, did not mention the engagement to him and hastily made his will. The Buffs sailed in November but Lord Craven followed later in his private yacht accompanied by Torn, who wrote to Cassandra on 8 January 1796 that if the winds allowed they would sail from Falmouth the following Sunday. When people set off on long sea voyages they were incommunicado for months. Letters could be sent only when ships put into port or met at sea. People left at home could only wait patiently for the return of their loved ones. The return of travellers was necessarily unscheduled and news arrived slowly.

  Tom caught yellow fever off San Domingo in February 1797, died and was buried at sea. The Austens, expecting to have him back with them at any time, did not hear of his death until a couple of months later. Lord Craven said afterwards that had he known Thomas was engaged to be married, he would never have taken him abroad.

  Cassandra remained close friends with Thomas’s parents for as long as they lived and with his brother Fulwar. Jane said her sister behaved with a degree of resolution and propriety which no common mind could evince in such a situation. Broken-hearted, Cassandra faced life with Christian stoicism. She went into full mourning as if she had been Tom’s widow. James later wrote a poem in Tom’s memory saying how much he had looked forward to officiating at the marriage of his sister and his friend.

  Sense and Sensibility was begun at this time and Elinor’s painful, disciplined self-command reflects Cassandra’s. But how Cassandra must have regretted that ‘sensible’ decision to wait, that fruitless two-year engagement and the poverty which was the only reason for delay! Excessive caution led to disaster and a long life of loneliness for Cassandra, especially after the early death of Jane. It is hard not to see parallels between Cassandra’s fate and the wistful unhappiness of Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Anne’s misery was remediable in consoling fantasy whereas Cassandra’s life was ruined by her loss. Although Thomas Fowle left her £1,000 she would surely have preferred a husband to a legacy. Towards the end of Persuasion comes the famous passage:

  How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been, - how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence! - She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

  Cassandra marked it and added in the margin, ‘Dear dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.’

  Captain Wentworth in the novel had been made commander in consequence of ‘the action off San Domingo’ and had come into Somersetshire in the summer of 1806. Captain Wentworth, like Jane’s brother Frank, was defending England’s colonial territories in the Caribbean.

  In her earliest surviving letter, written from Steventon to Cassandra on 9-10 January 1796, when Cassandra was staying with her intended parents-in-law at Kintbury, looking forward to her marriage, Jane writes of her own flirtation with Tom Lefroy, three weeks younger than herself. She mentions his birthday first, as almost coinciding with Cassandra’s.

  The ball Jane writes of was at the home of the rough Squire Har-wood. Serious-minded James’s dancing had improved. Cassandra had scolded Jane for behaviour which might give rise to gossip. Jane wrote teasingly:

  I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs Lefroy a few days ago.

  Next day Tom found the courage to return the call and Jane pretended to find fault with the colour of his morni
ng coat. Dark colours for men were replacing the pastels popular in the earlier eighteenth century and young men were wearing their own hair instead of powdered wigs. Jane attributed Tom’s old-fashioned taste for a light-coloured coat to his admiration for Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones. Jane herself had spent all her own small allowance on pink figured silk for her ballgown and white gloves to wear with it. She joked, though there may have been an element of seriousness, that she half expected a proposal. 'I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat.’ But the evening ended without any declaration from the young man.

  In her next letter (14 January) Jane drags in the mention of his name only to declare she does ‘not care sixpence’ for Tom. In the continuation next day Jane adds: ‘At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.’

  The reference to tears may be an exaggeration but there is no doubt Jane was hurt, if only in her pride. Among the music copied out by her own hand there is a heavy concentration of Irish airs, which may suggest some emotional involvement. However, she also had a lot of Scottish music and she knew no Scotsmen.

  Nearly three years after Tom’s departure Jane wrote to her sister, then at Godmersham, that Mrs Lefroy, Tom’s aunt, had called:

  In spite of interruptions both from my father and James, I was enough alone to hear all that was interesting, which you will easily credit when I tell you that of her nephew she said nothing at all, and of her friend very little. She did not once mention the name of the former to me, and I was too proud to make any inquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learned that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise. She showed me a letter which she had received from her friend a few weeks ago … towards the end of which was a sentence to this effect: ‘I am very sorry to hear of Mrs Austen’s illness. It would give me particular pleasure to have an opportunity of improving my acquaintance with that family - with a hope of creating to myself a nearer interest. But at present I cannot indulge any expectation of it.’

  Mrs Lefroy was the bearer of not one, but two pieces of bad news. Not only had the charming, if bashful, Tom Lefroy been shunted out of Jane’s orbit but the ‘friend’ referred to, another eligible young man, the Revd Samuel Blackall, had made it plain he could not ‘indulge’ any expectations of Jane. It is possible that Jane Austen gave him small encouragement. The letter to Cassandra, though, suggests she had cherished hopes or at least let her fancy play with agreeable possibilities. Mr Blackall was five years older than Jane, and had been a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before becoming Rector of North Cadbury in Somerset. He was married in 1813 to Susanna Lewis, ten years younger than himself.

  Jane’s letter to her sister continues:

  This is rational enough; there is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before, and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceedingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner. There seems no likelihood of his [Mr Blackall's] coming into Hampshire this Christmas, and it is therefore most probable that our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me. Mrs Lefroy made no remarks on the letter, nor did she indeed say anything about him as relative to me. Perhaps she thinks she has said too much already.

  Mrs Lefroy was the wife of the Rector of Ashe, the Revd Isaac Peter George Lefroy, and dignified with the courtesy title ‘Madam’ Lefroy. The family, of Huguenot origin, were worldly and intellectual. Anne Lefroy was better off than the Austens and did not need to manage her own dairy. She taught the village children to read and write, and to plait straw so that they could earn money by making hats. She vaccinated all her husband’s parishioners herself. Her brother, Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, rented Deane parsonage for two years. He said his sister had an exquisite taste for poetry and knew the works of Milton, Pope, Gray and Collins almost by heart, together with ‘the poetical passages of Shakespeare’. Sir Samuel has been confused by some biographers with Sir Brook Bridges, whose daughter Elizabeth married Jane’s brother Edward.

  Jane looked on Mrs Lefroy as a dear friend, though whether she acted the part of a true friend in teasing her nephew out of his attraction to a penniless girl may be doubted. Jane’s feelings were clearly piqued, not least her pride. She says she doesn’t care about Mr Blackall or about Tom but we do not believe her. She protests too much. Tom became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and lived to be ninety-three. He remembered Jane as the object of his youthful admiration all his life.

  In old age, he was proud of the early friendship with the celebrated Jane Austen, but said he loved her with a boy’s love’. He married a rich woman, Mary Paul, sister of a college friend, in 1799, and had nine children. He bought an estate in County Longford where his descendants still live.

  Although Mr and Mrs Lefroy teased Tom out of his feelings of attraction to Jane and packed him off to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn under the watchful eye of his Uncle Benjamin they blamed the young man himself for precipitating this decisive course of action. They told their sons that Tom had behaved badly in paying attention to Jane when he knew he could not afford to marry for a long while yet. The Lefroys’ predecessor at Ashe Rectory, later known as Ashe House, was the Revd Dr Richard Russell and some have wondered whether Lady Russell in Persuasion, who gives dangerously prudential advice to Anne Elliot, blighting her youthful romance at nineteen, owes something to ‘Madam’ Lefroy.

  The young Jane had fantasized about marriage, scrawling imaginary entries for herself and various young men on a blank page in her father’s church register, proclaiming the banns between herself and ‘Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam of London’, entering a record of marriage between herself and ‘Arthur William Mortimer’ and giving as the names of the witnesses Jack and Jane Smith, late Austen’.

  But marriage was not to be, for either sister. Jane may have reflected later that lack of money had cheated Cassandra of the happiness she had a right to expect, and had also driven Tom Lefroy away. There is another legend in the Austen family that Jane liked and was liked by another young man who died prematurely. The meeting is supposed to have happened at the seaside: either at Teignmouth, Sidmouth or Dawlish, some time in Jane’s mid-twenties. Cassandra liked the young man and was persuaded he was worthy of Jane, that he was in love with her and that she would have accepted him. Cassandra was apt to judge people coolly yet she admired him as ‘unusually gifted with all that was agreeable.’

  He arranged to meet the sisters at a later date but instead of a reunion all they had of him was news of his death. This story was told to Caroline Austen, James’s daughter, by Cassandra when she was an old woman. She told Caroline that he was pleasing and very good-looking. He is likely to remain another phantom romance in Jane Austen’s life, untraceable.

  Jane was also attracted to Edward Taylor of Bifrons, a manor house in Kent, improved from its Elizabethan origins to a smart new Georgian residence. The young man, a year younger than herself, was the son of the Revd Edward Taylor. On a visit to Kent in September 1796 Jane mentioned the house as being the ‘abode of him on whom I once fondly doted’. Edward Taylor was a distant relative of Elizabeth Bridges, who by this time had married Jane’s brother Edward.

  Jane was admired by the Revd Edward Bridges, Elizabeth’s younger brother. She first went to east Kent in 1794 when she was eighteen and two years later she danced with him at Goodnestone (pronounced Gunston), the Bridges family seat. Bridges playfully called her ‘t’other Miss Austen’ and in 1805, when Jane and he were staying at Goodnestone, Jane told Cassandra: ‘It is impossible to do justice to the hospitality of his attentions toward me; he made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account.’

  He seems to have proposed marriage, as Jane later implied they were still
friends though she had not been able to accept his ‘invitation’. He was later married unhappily to a woman who suffered from ‘spasms and nervousness’. He got into the habit of taking refuge at Godmersham with his sister and brother-in-law.

  Harry Digweed was a close friend and there is a family tradition that Jane Austen’s bossy Aunt Leigh-Perrot persuaded Jane’s father to leave Steventon for Bath because of a suspected romantic attachment between Jane and a Digweed. This seems improbable, as the Digweeds were perfectly eligible, though they only rented the Manor House, and it was no business of Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s anyway Be that as it may, George Austen perhaps thought his unmarried daughters would stand better chances of marrying if they met some new people. Harry married the feather-headed but lovable Jane Terry. The Terrys lived at Dummer House, near Steventon, a Georgian building which is still there.

  Jane was also friendly with Charles Fowle of Kintbury brother of Cassandra’s fiancé. She asked him to buy some silk stockings on her behalf but withdrew the request when she realized she could not afford them. When he bought them anyway she was cross but they stayed on good terms until he died suddenly at the age of thirty-five. He practised as a barrister and was active in home defence in 1799 and 1804-5 when Napoleon threatened to invade England.

  Other admirers were a Mr Heartley and John Willing Warren; Jane considered Warren ugly but pleasant. He was a college friend of her brothers James and Henry often staying at Steventon Rectory, and he contributed to their magazine. The Loiterer. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and was later called to the Bar, becoming a Charity Commissioner.

  According to family tradition Jane received a proposal from a young landowner called Thomas Harding Newman, who possessed three large estates, Nelmes and Clacton Hall in Essex and Black Callerton in Northumberland. He was four years younger than Jane Austen, a sporting gentleman who shot and kept his own pack of foxhounds. Thomas’s eldest son, Dr Thomas Harding Newman, was for half a century the owner of the ‘Zoffany’ portrait, which may possibly be of Jane Austen’s second cousin, Jane Motley Austen, who became Mrs Campion. Mrs Campion’s brother gave the picture to Dr Thomas Harding Newman’s stepmother, an admirer of Jane Austen’s novels, while Mrs Campion was still alive, which suggests the portrait was not of Mrs Campion in youth but of some other girl.