Edward’s children dictated letters to their Aunt Cassandra, written out by Jane. Fanny, aged six, said she was very happy at Bath but would be glad to get home and see her three younger brothers, George, Henry and William. Had the chaffinch’s nest in the garden hatched? She was afraid her papa was not much better for drinking the waters. Little Edward, a year younger, relayed a message from his grandmama, hoping that the white turkey was laying and that the black one had been eaten. He liked gooseberry pie and gooseberry pudding very much. Was it the same chaffinch’s nest as the one they had seen before they came away? ‘And pray will you send me another printed letter when you write to Aunt Jane again, if you like it,’ he added.
Jane added a postscript of her own saying they would be back at Steventon the following Thursday for a very late dinner, later than her father would like but she wouldn’t mind if he ate earlier. ‘You must give us something very nice, for we are used to live well,’ she wrote, for food was as absorbing an interest as were clothes.
In October 1800 Jane was writing from home to Cassandra at Godmersham. The weather was fine and warm for the time of year and Jane had been walking to visit relatives and friends. At Oakley Hall, seat of the neighbouring Bramston family, they ate sandwiches ‘all over mustard’ and admired Mr Bramston’s porter [beer] and Mrs Bramston’s transparencies. Mrs Augusta Bramston was in fact Mr Bramston’s sister, unmarried, but dignified with the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’ in the eighteenth-century way. Jane was promised two roots of heartsease pansies, one purple and one yellow. Edward had given Jane some money for charitable spending. In the village they bought ten pairs of stockings and a shift for Betty Dawkins, one of Jane’s poor. Betty wanted this undergarment more than the rug first thought of. Betty was duly grateful, sending Edward ‘a sight of thanks’ for his generosity.
In November 1800, Jane heard from Frank, who had written from the Peterel off Cyprus, having provisioned at Jaffa in Palestine, on 8 July 1800. He was off to Alexandria. Frank’s career was advancing well. He had been made Commander of the Peterel in 1798. Jane had heard from Charles and was to send the shirts his sisters were sewing for him six at a time as they were finished. His ship, the Endymion, was waiting for orders. Mrs Austen was happily dressing a doll for Anna. James’s wife Mary was delighted with a mangle, a gift from Edward, though the new maid had ‘jilted’ her and gone elsewhere. Mangles were new technology and a boon to women, who until then had to wring water by hand out of wet clothes and household linens. The mangle, which consists of rollers for squeezing water out of wet washing before it is hung out to dry, was invented the year Jane Austen was born.
Later that month Jane went to Lord Portsmouth’s ball at Hurstbourne Park in a gown she had borrowed from her aunt Mrs Leigh-Perrot. The morning after, her hand shook from drinking too much wine. Jane danced only nine dances out of twelve and was prevented from dancing the rest purely for want of a partner. This neglect riled her. Her tone about the evening and the other women is bitchy.
‘ One girl was ‘vulgar, broad-featured’; the Misses Maitland, nieces of her late sister-in-law, Anne Mathew, were only ‘prettyish’, resembling poor dead Anne in having ‘a good deal of nose’. ‘There were very few beauties, and such as there were, were not very handsome … Mrs Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband and fat neck.’ A pregnant-girl had danced away with great activity, having somehow got rid of a good part of her child and looking by no means very large’. Her husband, however, was ugly, ‘uglier even than his cousin John’ (the pleasant but plain John Warren). Jane reported that General Mathew, James’s first father-in-law, had the gout and his daughter Mrs Maitland the jaundice. ‘I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me,' writes Jane with a shudder of the three Debary sisters, whom she did not care for at all.
Charles was home, looking well and handsome. Jane had a new dress which she was more and more pleased with. Charles did not like it but Mr Austen and Mary did and Mrs Austen had come round to admitting it wasn’t so ugly after all. So eventually did Charles. James liked it so much that if Cassandra was willing to sell hers in the same pattern Mary would buy it. Jane spent a pleasant day with the Lefroys at Ashe, where fourteen sat down to dinner in the study because the dining-room chimney had been damaged in a storm. There were whist and casino games. James and Mrs Bramston took turns at reading Dr Edward Jenner’s pamphlet on the cowpox, while the Revd Henry Rice and Miss Lucy Lefroy, who were engaged to be married, ‘made love’.
The celebrated Dr Jenner of Awre in Gloucestershire promoted vaccination with cowpox vaccine against the then scourge of smallpox. He was to meet Jane’s niece Caroline in November 1813 at Cheltenham, then a spa (or as it was then called, a ‘spaw’) town where invalids went to drink mineral waters. Having some doubts that Caroline’s previous vaccination was effective, he revaccinated her himself. ‘I had therefore the honour,’ wrote Caroline, ‘of a second operation from the hands of the great discoverer himself; and at the end of the whole process, he pronounced it had been all right before.’
On 21 November another letter from Frank arrived dated 2 October. He wrote from Larnica in Cyprus after leaving Alexandria and was ignorant, as far as his sisters could tell, of his recent promotion to the rank of post-captain.
Around that time Cassandra went with Edward and Elizabeth to stay with Lewis and Fanny Cage of Milgate in Kent. Fanny was Elizabeth’s sister. On the way home Cassandra spent three weeks with Henry and Eliza in London. Jane went to stay with Martha Lloyd at Ibthorpe. Martha had asked her to bring books. Jane replied sharply that she was coming to talk, not to read. She could do that at home. She was reading Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain. A week later Cassandra was at Godmersham and Jane still at Ibthorpe.
At home, Steventon Rectory garden was being replanted with beech, ash and larch. The bank along the elm walk was sloped down to receive thorns and lilacs. There was a new suggestion for planting that part of the garden: should it be a little orchard, with apples, pears and cherries, or would larch, mountain ash and acacia be better? If Jane was bored with her life, she at least expected her home to be permanent until she should leave it for a home of her own. The weather was bad so even such ‘desperate walkers’ as Jane and Martha could not go for their usual promenades. They were cooped up all day from morning till night, literally as well as metaphorically. Life crawled on from day to day with little thought of change. The blow was yet to fall.
10
Exile, 1801
LATE IN THE year 1800 George Austen decided to retire, leaving James to take care of the combined parishes of Steventon and Deane. Like Sir Walter Elliot in Persuation but in circumstances even less favourable, he removed to Bath. Jane was shattered at the loss of her beloved childhood home which, like the farm labourer’s tied cottage, merely went with the job. Jane never lived in a secure home of her own. She had been away on the visit to Martha Lloyd and her mother at Ibthorpe, eighteen miles away, when the decision was arrived at but the information was delayed.
One day as Jane and Cassandra came in from a walk their mother announced with her usual briskness, ‘Well, girls, it is all settled. We have decided to leave Steventon and go to Bath.’ Jane was almost twenty-five; Cassandra, nearly three years older, had hoped to leave home as a bride. But as dependent daughters they had no choice other than to move with their parents. Their father always spoke of his grown daughters as ‘the girls’: ‘Have the girls gone out?’ he would say.
Mary Austen was waiting to greet Cassandra and Jane after their walk. When Jane received the edict she is said to have fainted. She resented having decisions affecting her future made above her head and behind her back. Mary was shocked to see such distress, though Jane was unaware of Mary’s sympathy for her and suspected Mary of having an eye to the main chance, elbowing Jane’s father out of his own rectory to make way for James. Jane complained to Cassandra that James and M
ary could not wait for his parents to go and were seizing everything by degrees. She refused an invitation to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary at Ibthorpe. Any stick would do to beat Mary with: Mary was to take Jane’s mother’s place at Steventon and enjoy its spacious garden while the Austens went into exile in one of Bath’s narrow town houses. Jane’s forebodings were perhaps justified. James did up the rectory endlessly with what Henry’s wife, Eliza, called ‘alterations and embellishments’ but when, years later, Edward became its owner and wanted to install his own son as rector, he decided it was fit only to be demolished and a new rectory built elsewhere. So much for the novelist’s birthplace.
Jane loved the countryside and said she was convinced that beauty of landscape must be one of the joys of heaven. The removal from the old house, spacious now her brothers had all left home, the garden, the wood walk and the fields, together with increased and not easily negotiable distance from friends, was horribly painful to hen She felt uprooted. The gipsyish life which she was to lead with her mother and sister for nearly a decade afterwards did not suit her at all and stopped her writing.
However close and affectionate the family, it is natural for adults to seek independence. Jane Austen was no worse off than other women of her generation and class, but she was trapped and she knew it. Again and again she writes of women with no money who can escape their cramped lives only by a good marriage: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Emma Woodhouse in Emma is a spoiled provincial princess with an independent fortune but in the background there is the danger of governessing hanging over Jane Fairfax. It was said that portionless girls became governesses if accomplished, milliners if not. Governesses were downtrodden, isolated and underpaid. It is not clear whether or not Anne Elliot in Persuasion has a marriage portion, but in situation she resembles Jane Austen most closely A single woman, her youth gone, she is forced to leave her childhood home and friends for Bath because her father is moving there. Anne hates everything about it. Creative writing, including comedy (and Jane Austen is a brilliantly funny writer), is often fuelled by pain and anger, the grit that makes the pearl.
The Leigh-Perrots invited the Austens to stay with them, at least initially, but Jane was determined to be independent. The aunt and uncle were delighted that the Austens were coming to Bath. However, they suspected something must lie behind the precipitate decision, and this was when Jane’s aunt speculated that Jane must be growing attached to William Digweed; but even if it had been so, neither her parents nor William’s would have had reason to object. William was the fourth Digweed son. Some letters over the Christmas period that year seem to be missing. Possibly Jane poured out her grief and rage to Cassandra at this time, for Cassandra was at Godmersham. If so Cassandra suppressed the letters.
Paragon, where the Leigh-Perrots lived, is the eastern side of a curved street on the slope of a steep hill. On the opposite side, called Vineyards, the terraced pavement was raised, to protect pedestrians from the mud and horse manure of the streets. In Jane’s day Paragon had only twenty-one houses, as those at the end of the row were known as Axford Buildings. Not far away is Camden Place, described by a contemporary writer as a ‘superb crescent composed of majestic buildings’. Readers of Persuasion will remember that Sir Walter Elliot chose Camden Place to live in when he left Kellynch Hall in Somerset for Bath because it had ‘a lofty and dignified situation, such as became a man of consequence.’
There were three parts of Bath under consideration by the Austens: Westgate Buildings (where Anne Elliot’s widowed friend in Persuasion, Mrs Smith, lived in penury); Charles Street; and some of the short streets leading from Laura Place or Pulteney Street. In Persuasion Viscountess Dalrymple and her daughter take a house in Laura Place. Mr Austen hankered after Laura Place and its environs but Jane expected, rightly, that the area would be too expensive. She fancied Charles Street as the buildings were new and near the Kingsmead fields. Charles Street led from the Queen Square chapel to the two green park streets. Mrs Austen liked Queen Square, and wanted the corner house in Chapel Row which opened into Prince’s Street, though she knew it only from outside. Jane thought it would be very pleasant to be near Sydney Gardens and have access to the Labyrinth every day. The Labyrinth no longer exists. She guessed that Mrs Leigh-Perrot would want them near her in Axford Buildings but, as Jane put it, the Austens hoped to escape.
Meanwhile their goods had to be disposed of. Most of the pictures, especially the Scriptural ones and a ‘battlepiece’, were to be left at Steventon for James, though Cassandra’s drawings and two paintings on tin would go with her. There was some doubt about the French agricultural prints in the best bedroom, which Mrs Austen said had been given by Edward to her daughters but Jane could not remember: she asked Cassandra whether she or Edward knew anything about them. Perhaps he had brought them home from his Grand Tour. The plan was for Mrs Austen and the girls to go ahead followed by the father about three weeks later. They were taking their beds with them but not the rest of the furniture. Transport costs were too high. They thought of taking the better pieces, the sideboard or the Pembroke table, but Jane decided that it was not worthwhile to take the chests of drawers. They would buy new, and bigger, ones made of deal and have them painted to look neat. The total value of their furniture was estimated at £2 00.
Mrs Austen did not feel her health would permit her to furnish the new home and Jane had promised that Cassandra would see to everything. Jane wanted Cassandra to be with her on the journey but Cassandra was going to the Lloyds. Martha had promised to visit Steventon in March and was more cheerful than she had been. Martha was in her mid-thirties. Her sisters Mary and Eliza were both married and she herself lived with an ailing widowed mother. Acquaintances continued to marry and have children while Martha and the Austen daughters stagnated. Young Lady Bridges was pregnant with her first child: Jane commented that she was ‘in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop, in for it!'
Jane reported on two forthcoming weddings with forced jocularity. In both cases the brides-to-be were widows. Mrs John Lyford was to ‘put in for being a widow again’ by marrying a Mr Fendall, a banker in Gloucester of very good fortune. Jane cheered herself up though by remembering that Mr Fendall was considerably older than his fiancée and encumbered with three small children. Mrs Lawrell was going to be married to a Mr Hinchman, a rich East Indian. It seemed unfair to Jane that women who had once achieved independence by marriage should be getting second bites at the cherry, and to men of wealth at that, while her own plight was inescapable.
There were other irritations. Peter Debary of the ‘endless’ Debary family, whose sisters’ bad breath Jane had commented on, had turned down the curacy at Deane under James because it was too far from London. Jane commented sarcastically that he might have said that about Exeter or York, Glencoe or Lake Katrine: but Hampshire? Mr Debary had shown himself ‘a Peter in the blackest sense of the word’. She meant he was ‘black Peter’, a name for the knave of spades, possibly alluding also to St Peter’s denial of Christ. Mr Austen thought of offering the job to James Digweed but he was already earning £75 a year and the Deane curacy was worth only £50.
For once Jane alluded in a letter to public affairs: ‘The threatened Act of Parliament does not seem to give any alarm.’ This was a proposal to peg the price of wheat to ten shillings the bushel as a disastrous harvest the previous autumn was causing hardship. Napoleon had risen to power in 1799 and Britain could not rely on imports to feed itself. The farmers opposed the measure as they stood to lose by it, and it was defeated. Jane added that her father was doing everything he could by raising his tithes and she hoped he would soon have nearly £600 a year. Out of that he would have to pay James for the curacies of Steventon and Deane, maintain four people and pay wages to the servants.
On 5 January 1801 Jane wrote to Cassandra, who was staying at Godmersham, that her mother intended
to keep two maids in Bath: ‘a steady cook, and a young and giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter. No children, of course, to be allowed on either side.’ The word sweetheart had a stronger meaning than we would attach to it. We wonder whether the letters Cassandra destroyed included similar naughty jokes. Menservants, adulterous or otherwise, turned out to be beyond the family’s means except temporarily. They generally kept a cook and a housemaid.
Neighbours bought up Mrs Austen’s poultry. Jane hoped the lands her father had farmed would not fall into the hands of Mr Harwood or Farmer Twitchen but would go to a neighbour, Mr Holder. John Bond, now too old to do more than look after sheep, had to be found a job, not too strenuous. John himself was unconcerned, confident of getting another place as a farmer had told him he would take him on if he ever left the Rector’s employ Mr Holder did take over the farm and employ John Bond, who was relieved to keep his home. This did not satisfy Jane, who thought John would have been better off working for Harry Digweed. Harry would probably have supplied him with a more permanent dwelling and kept a horse for him to ride about on.
A visit by Cassandra to London had been put off so she had to forego the opera and miss seeing the celebrated actress Mrs Jordan. Jane told her sister rather tartly that both Cassandra and her mother had chosen to offer advice as to how Jane should dispose of her possessions:’… but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.’ She was growing prickly.
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